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AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LOVE-LETTERS 


CHICAGO 

DONOHUE BROTHERS 

407-429 Dearborn Street. 



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AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 
LOVE-LETTERS. 


EXPLANATION. 

It need hardly be said that the woman by whom 
these letters were written had no thought that 
they would be read by any one hut the person to 
whom they were addressed. But a request, con- 
veyed under circumstances which the writer her- 
self would have -regarded as all-commanding, 
urges that they should now be given to the world: 
and, so far as is possible with a due regard to the 
claims of privacy, what is here printed presents 
the letters as they were first written in their com- 
plete form and sequence. 

Very little has been omitted which in any way 
hears upon the devotion of which they are a 
record. A few names of persons and localities 
have been changed; and several short notes (not 
above twenty in all), together with some passages 
bearing too intimately upon events which might 
he recognized, have been left out without indica- 
tion of their omission. 


3 


4 


ASX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


It was a necessary condition to the present pub- 
lication that the authorship of these letters should 
remain unstated. Those who know will keep 
silence: those who do not, will not find here any 
data likely to guide them to the truth. 

The story which darkens these pages cannot be 
more fully indicated while the feelings of some 
who are still living have to be consulted : nor will 
the reader find the root of the tragedy explained 
in the letters themselves. But one thing at least 
may be said as regards the principal actors — that 
to the memory of neither of them does any blame 
belong. They were equally the victims of circum- 
stances, which came whole out of the hands of 
fate and remained, so far as one of the two was 
concerned, a mystery to the day of her death. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


5 


LETTER I. 

Beloved, — This is your first letter from me: y^et 
it is not the first I have written to you. There 
are letters to you lying at love’s dead-letter office 
in this same writing — so many, my memory has 
lost count of them ! 

This is my confession: I told von I had one to 
make, and you laughed: — you did not know how 
serious it was — for to be in love with you long be- 
fore you were in love with me, — nothing can be 
more serious than that ! 

You deny that I was: yet I know when you 
first really loved me. All at once, one day some- 
thing about me came upon you as a surprise : and 
how, except on the road to love, can there he sur- 
prises? And in the surprise came love. You did 
not know me before. Before then, it was only the 
other nine entanglements which take hold of the 
male heart and occupy it till the tenth is ready to 
make one knot of them all. 

In the letter written that day, I said, “ You 
love me.” I could never have said it before; 
though I had written twelve letters to my love for 
you, I had not once been able to write of your 
love for me. Was not that serious ? 


6 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

Now I have confessed! I thought to discover 
myself all blushes, but my face is cool: you have 
kissed all my blushes away! Can I ever be 
ashamed in your eyes now, or grow rosy because 
of anything you think or I think ? So ! — you 
have robbed me of one of my charms: I am 
brazen. Can you love me still? 

You love me, you love me; you are wonderful! 
we are both wonderful, you and I. 

Well, it is good for you to know I have waited 
and wished, long before the thing came true. But 
to see you waiting and wishing, when the thing 
ivcls true all the time : — oh ! that was the trial ! 
How not suddenly to throw my arms round you 
and cry, “ Look, see ! 0 blind mouth, why are you 
famished ? " 

And you never knew? Dearest, I love you for 
it, you never knew ! I believe a man, when he 
finds he has won, thinks he has taken the city by 
assault: he does not guess how to the insiders it 
has been a weary siege, with flags of surrender 
fluttering themselves to rags from every wall and 
window ! No : in love it is the women who are 
the strategists; and they have at last to fall into 
the ambush they know of with a good grace. 

You must let me praise myself a little for the 
past, since I can never praise myself again. You 
must do that for me now! There is not a battle 
left for me to win. You and peace hold me so 
much a prisoner, have so caught me from my own 
way of living, that I seem to hear a pin drop 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


7 


twenty years ahead of me: it seems an event! 
Dearest, a thousand times, I would not have it be 
otherwise : I am only too willing to drop out of ex- 
istence altogether and find myself in your arms 
instead. Giving you my love, I can so easily give 
you my life. Ah, my dear, I am yours so utterly, 
so gladly! Will you ever find it out, you, who 
took so long to discover anything? 


8 


Aff ENGLISHWOMANS 


LETTER II. 

•Dearest, — Your name woke me this morning: 
I found my lips piping their song before I was 
well back into my body out of dreams. I wonder 
if the rogues babble when my spirit is nesting? 
Last night you were a high tree and I was in it, 
the wind blowing us both; but I forget the rest, 
— whatever, it was enough to make me wake 
happy. 

There are dreams that go out like candle-light 
directly one opens the shutters: they illumine the 
walls no longer; the daylight is too strong for 
them. So, now, I can hardly remember anything 
of my dreams: daylight, with you in it, floods 
them out. 

Oh, how are you? Awake? Up? Have you 
breakfasted? I ask you a thousand things. You 
are thinking of me, I know: but what are you 
thinking? I am devoured by curiosity about my- 
self — none at all about you, whom I have all by 
heart ! If I might only know how happy I make 
you, and just which thing I said yesterday is mak- 
ing you laugh to-day — I could cry with joy over 
being the person I am. 

It is you who make me think so much about 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


9 


myself, trying to find myself out. I used to be 
most self-possessed, and regarded it as the crown- 
ing virtue: and now — your possession of me 
sweeps it away, and I stand crying to be let into 
a secret that is no longer mine. Shall I ever 
know ivhy you love me? It is my religious diffi- 
culty; but it never rises into a doubt. You do 
love me, I know. Why, I don’t think I ever can 
know. 

Yet ask me the same question about yourself, 
and it becomes absurd, because I altogether be- 
long to you. If I hold my breath for a moment 
wickedly (for I can’t do it breathing), and try 
to look at the world with you out of it, I seem to 
have fallen over a precipice; or rather, the solid 
earth has slipped from under my feet, and I am 
off into vacuum. Then, as I take breath again for 
fear, my star swims up and clasps me, and shows 
me your face. 0 happy star this that I was born 
under, that moved with me and winked quiet 
prophecies at me all through my childhood, I not 
knowing what it meant: — the dear radiant thing 
naming to me my lover ! 

As a child, now and then, and for no reason, I 
used to be sublimely happy: real wings took hold 
of me. Sometimes a field became fairyland as 1 
walked through it; or a tree poured out a scent 
that its blossoms never had before or after. I 
think now that those must have been moments 
when you too were in like contact with earth, — 
had your feet in grass which felt a faint ripple 


10 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


of wind, or stood under a lilac in a drench of 
fragrance that had grown double after rain. 

When I asked you about the places of your 
youth, I had some fear of finding that we might 
once have met, and that I had not remembered it 
as the summing up of my happiness in being 
young. Ear off I see something undiscovered 
waiting us, something I could not have guessed at 
before — the happiness of being old. Will it not 
be something like the evening before last w T hen 
we were sitting together, your hand in mine, and 
one by one, as the twilight drew about us, the stars 
came and took up their stations overhead? They 
seemed to me then to be following out some quiet 
train of thought in the universal mind: the heav- 
ens were remembering the stars back into their 
places: — the Ancient of Days drawing upon the 
infinite treasures of memory in his great lifetime. 
Will not Love’s old age be the same to us both— 
a starry place of memories? 

Your dear letter is with me while I write: how 
shortly you are able to say everything! To-mor- 
row you will come. What more do I want — 
except to-morrow itself, with more promises of 
the same thing? 

You are at my heart, dearest: nothing in the 
world can be nearer to me than you ! 


LOVE-LfiTTERS. 


11 


LETTER III. 

Dearest and rightly Beloved, — You cannot 
tell how your gift has pleased me; or rather you 
can , for it shows you have a long memory back 
to our first meeting: though at the time I was 
the one who thought most of it. 

It is quite true; you have the most beautifully 
shaped memory in Christendom : these are the very 
books in the very edition I have long wanted, and 
have been too humble to afford myself. And now 
1 cannot stop to read one, for joy of looking at 
them all in a row. I will kiss you for them all, 
and for more besides: indeed it is the “ besides ” 
which brings you my kisses at all. 

Now that you have chosen so perfectly to my 
mind, I may proffer a request which, before, I 
was shy of making. It seems now beneficently 
anticipated. It is that you will not ever let your 
gifts take the form of jewelry, not after the 
ring which you are bringing me: that , you know, 
I both welcome and wish for. But, as to the rest, 
the world has supplied me with a feeling against 
jewelry as a love-symbol. Look abroad and you 
will see: it is too possessive, too much like “ chains 
of office ” — the fair one is to wear her radiant ha;- 


12 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


ness before the world, that other women may be 
envious and the desire of her master’s eye be sat- 
isfied! Ah, no! 

I am yours, dear, utterly; and nothing you 
give me would have that sense: I know you too 
well to think it. But in the face of the present 
fashion (and to flout it), which expects the lover 
to give in this sort, and the beloved to show her- 
self a dazzling captive, let me cherish my ritual 
of opposition which would have no meaning if 
we were in a world of our own, and no place in my 
thoughts, dearest ; — as it has not now, so far as you 
are concerned. But I am conscious I shall be 
looked at as your chosen; and I would choose my 
own way of how to look back most proudly. 

And so for the books more thanks and more, — 
that they are what I would most wish, and not 
anything else: which, had they been, they would 
still have given me pleasure, since from you they 
could come only with a good meaning: and — ■ 
diamonds even — I could have put up with them ! 

To-morrow you come for your ring, and bring 
me my own? Yours is here waiting. I have it 
on my finger, very loose, with another standing 
sentry over it to keep it from running away. 

A mouse came out of my wainscot last night, 
and plunged me in horrible dilemma: for I am 
equally idiotic over the idea of the creature 
trapped or free, and I saw sleepless nights ahead 
of me till I had secured a change of locality for 
him. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


13 


To startle him back into hiding would have 
only deferred my getting truly rid of him, so I 
was most tiptoe and diplomatic in my doings. 
Finally, a paper bag, put into a likely nook with 
some sentimentally preserved wedding-cake crum- 
bled into it, crackled to me of his arrival. In a 
brave moment I noosed the little beast, bag and 
all, and lowered him from the window by string, 
till the shrubs took from me the burden of re- 
sponsibility. 

I visited the bag this morning: he had eaten 
his way out, crumbs and all: and has, I suppose, 
become a fieldmouse, for the hay smells invit- 
ingly, and it is only a short run over the lawn 
and a jump over the ha-ha to be in it. Poor mor- 
sels, I prefer them so much undomesticated! 

Now this mouse is no allegory, and the paper 
bag is not a diamond necklace, in spite of the 
wedding-cake sprinkled over it! So don’t say 
that this letter is too hard for your understand- 
ing, or you will frighten me from telling you 
anything foolish again. Brains are like jewels in 
this, difference of surface has nothing to do with 
the size and value of them. Yours is a beautiful 
smooth round, like a pearl, and mine all facets 
and flashes like cut glass. And yours so much 
the bigger, and I love it so much the best! The 
trap which caught me was baited with one great 
pearl. So the mouse comes in with a meaning 
tied to its tail after all ! 


14 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTEE IV. 

In all the world, dearest, what is more unequal 
than love between a man and a woman? I have 
been spending an amorous morning and want to 
share it with you: but lo, the task of bringing 
that bit of my life into your vision is altogether 
beyond me. 

What have I been doing? Dear man, I have 
been dressmaking! and dress, when one is in the 
toils, is but a love-letter writ large. You will see 
and admire the finished thing, but you will take 
no interest in the composition. Therefore I say 
your love is unequal to mine. 

For think how ravished I would be if you 
brought me a coat and told me it was all your 
own making ! One day you had thrown down a 
mere tailor-made thing in the hall, and yet I 
kissed it as I went by. And that was at a time 
when we were only at the handshaking stage, the 
palsied beginnings of love : — you, I mean ! 

But oh, to get you interested in the dress I was 
making to you to-day ! — the beautiful flowing 
opening, — not too flowing: the elaborate central 
composition where the heart of me has to come, 
and the wind-up of the skirt, a long reluctant 


LOVE-LETTERS. Id 

tailing-off, full of commas and colons of ribbon 
to make it seem longer, and insertions everywhere. 
I dreamed myself in it, retiring through the door 
after having bidden you good night, and you 
watching the long disappearing eloquence of that 
tail, still saying to you as it vanished, “ Good- 
by, good-by. I love you so! see me, how slowly 
I am going ! ” 

Well, that is a bit of my dressmaking, a very 
corporate part of my affection for you; and you 
are not a bit interested, for I have shown you none 
of the seamy side; it is that which interests you 
male creatures, Zolaites, every one of you. 

And what have you to show similar, of the 
thought of me entering into all your masculine 
pursuits? Do you go out rabbit-shcoting for the 
love of me? If so, I trust you make a miss of it 
every time ! That you are a sportsman is one of 
the very hardest things in life that I have to bear. 

Last night Peterkins came up with me to keep 
guard against any further intrusion of mice. I 
put her to sleep on the couch: but she discarded 
the red shawl I had prepared for her at the bot- 
tom, and lay at the top most uncomfortably in a 
parcel of millinery into which from one end I had 
already made excavations, so that it formed a 
large bag. Into the further end of this bag Turks 
crept and snuggled down : but every time she 
turned in the night (and it seemed very often) 
the brown paper crackled and woke me up. So 
at last I took it up and shook out its contents; 


16 


^N ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


and Pippins slept soundly oil red flannel ti/1 Nan- 
nan brought the tea. 

You will notice that in this small narrative 
Peterkins gets three names: it is a fashion that 
runs through the household, beginning with the 
Mother- Aunt, who on some days speaks of Nan- 
nan as “the old lad} r ,” and sometimes as “that 
girl,” all according to the two tempers she has 
about Nan-nan’s privileged position in regard to 
me. 

You were only here yesterday, and already I 
want you again so much, so much ! 

Y'our never satisfied but always loving. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


1 ? 


LETTER V. 

Most Beloved, — I have been thinking, staring at 
this blank piece of paper, and wondering how 
there am I ever to say what I have in me here — 
not wishing to say anything at all, but just to be ! 
I feel that I am living now only because you love 
me: and that my life will have run out, like this 
penful of ink, when that use in me is past. Not 
yet, Beloved, oh, not yet ! Nothing is finished 
that we have to do and be : — hardly begun ! I 
will not call even this “ midsummer/’ however 
much it. seems so: it is still only spring. 

Every day your love binds me more deeply 
than I knew the day before: so that no day is 
the same now, but each one a little happier than 
the last. My own, you are my very own ! And 
yet, true as that is, it is not so true as that I am 
your own. It is less absolute, I mean; and must 
be so, because I cannot very well take possession 
of anything when I am given over heart and soul 
out of my own possession: there isn’t enough 
identity left in me, I am yours so much, so much ! 
All this is useless to say, yet what can I say else, 
if I have to begin saying anything. 

Could I truly be your “ star and goddess,” as 
you call me, Beloved, I would do you the service 
2 


18 


Aisf E HGLI S H W OMAN' & 


of Thetis at least (who did it for a greater than 
herself) — 

“ Bid Heaven and Earth combine their charms, 
And round you early, round you late, 

Briareus fold his hundred arms 
To guide you from your single fate.” 

But I haven’t got power over an eight-armed 
octopus even : so am merely a very helpless loving 
nonentity which merges itself most happily in 
you, and begs to be lifted to no pedestal at all, at 
all. 

If you love me in a manner that. is at all pos- 
sible, you will see that “ goddess ” does not suit 
me. “ Star ” I Tfould I were now, with a wide 
e} r e to carry my looks to you over this horizon 
which keeps you invisible. Choose one, if you 
will, dearest, and call it mine : and to me it shall 
be yours : so that when we are apart and the stars 
come out,' our eyes may meet up at the same point- 
in the heavens, and be “ keeping company” for 
us among the celestial bodies— with their permis- 
sion: for I have too lively a sense of their beauty 
not to he a little superstitious about them. Have 
you not felt for yourself a sort of physiognomy 
in the constellations, — tnost of them seeming be- 
nevolent and full of kind regards : — but not all ? 
1 am always glad when the Great Bear goes away 
from my window, tine beast though he is: he 
seems to growl at me ! Ho doubt it is largely a 
question of names; and what’s in a name? In 
yours, Beloved, when I speak it, more love than I 
can compass! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


19 


LETTER VI. 

Beloved, — I have been trusting to fate, while 
keeping silence, that something from you was to 
come to-day and make me specially happy. And 
it has: bless you abundantly! You have undone 
and got round all 1 said about “ jewelry,” though 
this is nothing of the sort, but a shrine: so my 
word remains. I have it with me now, safe hid- 
den, only now and then it comes out to have a 
look at me, — smiles and goes back again. Dear- 
est, you must feel how I thank you, for I cannot 
say it: body and soul I grow too much blessed 
with all that you have given me, both visibly and 
invisibly, and always perfectly. 

And as for the day: I have been thinking you 
the most uncurious of men, because you had not 
asked: and supposed it was too early days yet for 
you to remember that I had ever been born. To- 
day is my birthday ! you said nothing, so I said 
nothing; and yet this has come: I trusted my 
star to show its sweet influences in its own way. 
Or, after all, did you know, and had you asked 
any one but me? Yet had you known, you would 
have wished me the “happy returns” which 
among all your dear words to me you do not. So 


20 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


I take it that the motion comes straight to you 
from heaven; and, in the event, you will pardon 
me for having been still secretive and shy in not 
telling what you did not inquire after. Yours, 
I knew, dear, quite long ago, so had no need to 
ask you for it. And it is six months before you 
will be in the same year with me again, and give 
to twenty-two all the companionable sweetness 
that twenty-one has been having. 

Many happy returns of my birthday to you, 
dearest! That is all that my birthdays are for. 
Have you been happy to-day, I wonder? and am 
wondering also whether this evening we shall see 
you walking quietly in and making everything 
into perfection that has been trembling just on the 
verge of it all day long. 

One drawback of my feast is that I have to 
write short to you; for there are other corre- 
spondents who on this occasion look for quick 
answers, and not all of them to be answered in 
an offhand way. Except you, it is the cosiest 
whom I keep waiting; but elders have a way with 
them — even kind ones : and when they conde- 
scend to write upon an anniversary, we have to 
skip to attention or be in their bad books at once. 

So with the sun still a long way out of bed, I 
have to tuck up these sheets for you, as if the good 
of the day had already been sufficient unto itself 
and its full tale had been told. Good night. It 
is so hard to take my hands off writing to you, and 
worry on at the same exercise in another direc- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


21 


tion. I kiss you more times than I can count: it 
is almost really you that I kiss now ! My very 
dearest, my own sweetheart, whom I so wor- 
ship. Good night ! “ Good afternoon 99 sounds 

too funny: is outside our vocabulary altogether. 
While I live, I must love you more than I know ! 


£ 2 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER VII. 

My Fuiend, — Do you think this a cold way of 
beginning? I do not: is it not the true send-off 
of love? I do not know how men fall in love: 
but I could not have had that come-down in your 
direction without being your friend first. Oh, my 
dear, and after, after; it is hut a limitless friend- 
ship I have grown into ! 

I have heard men run down the friendships of 
women as having little true substance. Those 
who speak so, I think, have never come across a 
real case of woman’s friendship. I praise my own 
sex, dearest, for I know some of their loneliness, 
which you do not: and until a certain date their 
friendship was the deepest thing in life I had met 
with. 

For must it not he true that a woman becomes 
more absorbed in friendship than a man, since 
friendship may have to mean so much more to 
her, and cover so far more of her life, than it does 
to the average man? However big a man’s capac- 
ity for friendship, the beauty of it does not fill 
his whole horizon for the future: he still looks 
ahead of it for the mate who will complete his 
life, giving his body and soul the complement 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


23 


vhey require. Friendship alone does not satisfy 
him: he makes a bigger claim on life, regarding 
certain possessions as his right. 

But a woman: — oh, it is a fashion to say the 
best women aie sure to find husbands, and have, 
if they care for it, the certainty before them of a 
full life. I know it is not so. There arc women, 
wonderful ones, who come to know quite early in 
life that no men will ever wish to make wives of 
.them: for them, then, love in friendship is all 
that remains, and the strongest wish of all that 
can pass through their souls with hope for its ful- 
filment is to be a friend to somebody. 

It is man’s arrogant certainty of his future 
v/hich makes him impatient of the word “ friend- 
ship ” : it cools life to his lips, he so confident 
that the headiermectar is his due ! 

I came upon a little phrase the other day that 
touched me so deeply: it said so well what I have 
wanted to say since we have known each other. 
Some peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing 
his love’s praises, and sinks his voice from the 
height of his passionate superlatives to call her 
his “ share of the world.” Peasant and Irishman, 
he knew that his fortune did not embrace the uni- 
verse: but for him his love was just that — his 
share of the world. 

Surely when in any one’s friendship we seem to 
have gained our share of the world, that is all that 
can be said. It means all that we can take in, the 
whole armful the heart and senses are capable of, 


21 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


or that fate can bestow. And for how many that 
must be friendship — especially foi- how many 
women ! 

My dear, you are my share of the world, also 
my share of Heaven: but there I begin to speak 
of what I do not know, as is the way with happy 
humanity. All that my eyes could dream of wak- 
ing or sleeping, all that my ears could be most 
glad to hear, all that my heart could beat faster to 
get hold of — your friendship gave me suddenly as 
a bolt from the blue. 

My friend, my friend, my friend ! If you could 
change or go out of my life now, the sun would 
drop out of my heavens: I should see the world 
with a great piece gashed out of its side, — my 
share of it gone. No, I should not see it, I don’t 
think I should see anything ever again, — not 
truly. 

Is it not strange how often to test our happi- 
ness we harp on sorrow? I do: don’t let it weary 
you. I know I have read somewhere that great 
love always entails pain. I have not found it 
yet: but, for me, it does mean fear, — the sort of 
fear I had as a child going into big buildings. I 
loved them: but I feared, because of their big- 
ness, they were likely to tumble on me. 

But when I begin to think you may be too big 
for me, I remember you as my “ friend,” and the 
fear goes for a time, or becomes that sort of fear 
I would not part with if I might. 

I have no news for you : only the old things to 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


25 


tell you, the wonder of which ever remains new. 
How holy yonr face has become to me: as I saw 
it last, with something more than the nsnal proofs 
of love for me upon it — a look 'as if your love 
troubled you ! I know the trouble : I feel it, dear- 
est, in my own woman’s way. Have patience. — 
When I see you so, I feel that prayer is the only 
way given me for saying what my love for you 
wishes to be. And yet I hardly ever pray in 
words. 

Dearest, be happy when you get this: and, 
when you can, come and give my happiness its 
rest. Till then it is a watchman on the lookout. 

“ Night-night ! ” Your true sleepy one. 


26 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


< 


LETTER VIII. 

Now why, I want to know, Beloved, was I so 
specially “good ” to you in my last? I have been 
quite as good to you fifty times before, — if such a 
thing can be from me to you. Or do you mean 
good for you? Then, dear, I must be sorry that 
the thing stands out so much as an exception ! 

Oh, dearest Beloved, for a little I think I must 
not love you so much, or must not let you see it. 

When does your mother return, and when am I 
to see her? I long to so much. Has she still not 
written to you about our newo? 

I woke last night to the sound of a great flock 
of sheep going past. I suppose they were going 
by forced marches to the fair over at Hylesbury. It 
was in the small hours : and a few cf them lifted 
up their voices and complained of this robbery of 
night and sleep in the night. They were so tired, 
so tired, they said: and so did the muffawully 
patter of their poor feet. The lambs said most: 
and the sheep agreed with a husky croak. 

I said a prayer for them, and went to sleep 
again as the sound of the lambs died away; but 
somehow they stick in my heart, those sad sheep 
driven along through the night. It was in its <Je- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


o y 

st i 


gree like the woman hurrying along, who said, 
“ My God, my God ! ” that summer Sunday morn- 
ing. These notes from lives that appear and dis- 
appear remain endlessly; and I do not think our 
hearts can have been made so sensitive to suffering 
we can do nothing to relieve, without some good 
reason. So I tell you this, as I would any sorrow 
of my own, because it has become a part of me, 
and is underlying all that I think to-day. 

I am to expect you the day after to-morrow, 
but “not for certain”? Thus you give and you. 
take away, equally blessed in either case. All the 
same, 1 shall certainly expect you, and he disap- 
pointed if on Thursday at about this hour your 
way be not my way. 

“ How shall I my true love know " if he does 
not come often enough to see me? Sunshine be 
on you all possible hours till we meet again. 


28 


A N ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER IX. 

Beloved, — Is the morning looking at you as it is 
looking at me? A little to the right of the sun 
there lies a small cloud, filmy and faint, but 
enough to cast a shadow somewhere. From this 
window, high up over the view, I cannot see where 
the shadow of it falls, — further than my eye can 
reach: perhaps just now over you, since you lie 
further west. But I cannot he sure. We cannot 
be sure about the near things in this world; only 
about what is far off and fixed. 

You and I looking up see the same sun, if there 
are no clouds over us : but we may not be looking 
at the same clouds even when both our hearts are 
in shadow. That is so, even when hearts are as 
close together as yours and mine: they respond 
to the same light: but each one has its own roof 
of shadow, wearing its rue with a world of differ- 
ence. 

Why is it? why can no two of us have sorrows 
quite in common? What can be nearer together 
than our wills to be one ? In joy we are ; and yet, 
though I reach and reach, and sadden if you are 
sad, I cannot make your sorrow my own. 

I suppose sorrow is of the earth earthy: and 


LOVE-LETTEKS. 


29 


all that is of earth makes division. Every joy 
that belongs to the body casts shadows somewhere. 
I wonder if there can enter into ns a joy that has 
no shadow anywhere? The joy of having you has 
behind it the shadow of parting; is there any way 
of loving that would make parting no sorrow at 
all ? To me, now, the idea seems treason ! I cling 
to my sorrow that you are not here : I send up my 
cloud, as it were, to catch the sun’s brightness: 
it is a kite that I pull with my heart-strings. 

To the sun of love the clouds that cover ab- 
sence must look like white flowers in the green 
fields of earth, or like doves hovering : and he 
reaches down and strokes them with his warm 
beams, making all their feathers like gold. 

Some clouds let the gold come through; mine, 
now. — That cloud I saw away to the right is com- 
ing this way towards me. I can see the shadow 
of it now, moving along a far-off strip of road: 
and I wonder if it is your cloud, with you tinder 
it coming to see me again ! 

When you come, why am I any happier than 
when I know you are coming? It is the same 
thing in love. I have you now all in my mind’s 
eye; I have you by heart: have I my arms a bit 
more round you then than now ? 

How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, 
there should be disappearances and reappearances : 
and faces now and then showing a change! — 
You, actually, the last time you came, looking 
a day older than the day before! What was it? 


30 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a 
wrinkle in the art of dying? Or had you turned 
over some new leaf, and found it withered on the 
other side? 

I could not see how it was: I heard you com- 
ing — it was spring ! The door opened : — oh, it 
was autumnal ! One day had fallen away like a 
leaf out of my forest, and I had not been there to 
see it go! 

At what hour of the twenty-four does a day 
shed itself out of our lives? Not, I think, on the 
stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow. 
Some people, perhaps, would say — with the first 
sleep ; and that the “ beauty-sleep ” is the new 
day putting out its green wings. I think it must 
be not till something happens to make the new day 
a stronger impression than the last. So it would 
please me to think that your yesterday dropped off 
ns you opened the door; and that, had I peeped 
and seen you coming up the stairs, I should have 
seen you looking a day younger. 

That means that you age at the sight of me ! 
I think you do. I, I feel a hundred on the road 
to immortality, directly your face dawns on me. 

There’s a foot gone over my grave ! The angel 
of the resurrection with his mouth pursed fast to 
his trumpet! — Nothing else than the gallop-a- 
gallop of your horse: — it sounds like a kettle 
boiling over! 

So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the 
while we talk; and comes out afterwards with all 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


31 


its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and sent 
off the moment your back is turned. No, better! 
— to be slipped into your pocket and carried home 
to yourself by yourself. How, when you get to 
your destination and find it, you will curse your- 
self that you were not a speedier postman ! 




32 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER X. 

Dearest, — Did you find your letter? The quick- 
er I post, the quicker I need to sit down and write 
again. The grass under love’s feet never stops 
growing: I must make hay of it while the sun 
shines. 

You say my metaphors make you giddy. — My 
dear, you, without a metaphor in your composi- 
tion, do that to me ! So it is not for you to com- 
plain ; your curses simply fly back to roost. 
Where do you pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I 
mean to write now until I have made you as 
giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are 
much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie of 
them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open 
it they sing “ Chewee, chewee, chewee ! ” in the 
most scared way ! 

Your last but three said most solemnly, just as 
if you meant it, “ I hope you don’t keep these 
miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours 
with them, there is no reason why they should fill 
up yours.” You added that I was better occu- 
pied — and here I am “ better occupied” even as 
ycu bid me. 

But one can jump best from a spring-board: 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


33 


and how could I jump as far as youi arms by 
letter, if I had not yours to jump from ? 

So you see they are kept, and my disobed- 
ience of you has begun: and I find disobedience 
wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law 
which you knew I should disobey: — that is the 
way the world began. It is not for nothing that 
I am p daughter of Eve. 

And here is our world in our hands, yours and 
mine, now in the making. Which day are the 
evening and the morning now? I think it must 
be the birds’ — and already, with the wings, dis- 
obedience has been reached! Make much of it! 
the day will come when I shall wish to obey. 
There are moments when I feel a wish taking hold 
of me stronger than I can understand, that you 
should command me beyond myself — to things 
I have not strength or courage for of my own ac- 
cord. How close, dearest, when that day comes, 
my heart will feel itself to yours! It feels close 
now: but it is to your feet I am nearest, as yet. 
Lift me! There, there, Beloved, I kiss you with 
all my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for be- 
ing no more than I am : your freehold to all eter- 
nity! 

3 


34 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER XI. 

On, Dearest, — I have danced and I have danced 
till I am tired ! I am dropping with sleep, but I 
must just touch you and say good night. This 
was our great day of publishing, dearest, ours: 
all the world knows it; and all admire your 
choice ! I was determined they should ! I have 
been collecting scalps for you to hang at your 
girdle. All thought me beautiful: people who 
never did so before. I wanted to say to them, 
“ Am I -not beautiful? I am, am I not?” And 
it. was not for myself I was asking this praise. 
Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose — what you 
gave me when we parted: you saying, alas, that 
you were not to be there. But you were! Its 
leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. 
I kiss yon out of the heart of it. Good night: 
come to me in my first dream ! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


35 




LETTER XII. 

Dearest, — It has been such a funny day from 
post-time onwards: — congratulations on the great 
event are beginning to arrive in envelopes and on 
wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some 
are not so — only the ordinary seemliness of polite 
sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone yesterday, 

Mrs. called and was told the news. Of 

course she knew of you : but didn’t think she had 
ever seen you. “ Probably he passed you at the 
gates,” I said. “ What ? ” she went olf with a 
view-halloo; "that well-dressed sort of young 
fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing 
how to ride? Met us in the lane. Well, my dear, 
I do congratulate you ! ” 

And whether it was by the gray suit, or the 
mustache, or the knowing how to ride that her 
congratulations were so emphatically secured, I 
know not ! 

Others are yet more quaint, and more to my 
likiog. Nan-nan is Nan-nan : 1 cannot let you 
off what she said ! No tears or sentiment came 
from her to prevent me laughing: she brisked 
like an old war-horse at the first word of it, and 
blessed God that it had come betimes, that she 


3G 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


might be a nurse again in her old age ! She is a 
true “ Mrs. Berry,” and is ready to make room 
for you in my affections for the sake of far-off 
divine events, which promise renewed youth to 
her old bones. 

Koberts, when he brought me my pony this 
morning, touched his hat quick twice over to show 
that the news brimmed in his body: and a very 
nice cordial way of showing, I thought it ! He 
was quite ready to talk when I let him go ; and he 
gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you 

when he was in service at the H s, and speaks 

of you as being then “a gallous young hound,” 
whatever that may mean. I imagine “ gallous” 
to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up 
in equal parts of callousness and gallant^, which 
most boys are, at some stage of their existence. 

What tales will you be getting of me out of 
Nan-nan, some day behind my back, I wonder? 
There is one I shall forbid her to reveal: it shall 
be part of my marriage-portion to show you early 
that you have got a wife with a temper ! 

Here is a whole letter that must end now, — 
and the great Word never mentioned ! It is good 
for you to be put upon maigre fare, for once. I 
hoZd my pen back with both hands: it wants so 
much to give you the forbidden treat. Oh, the 
serpent in the garden! See where it has under- 
lined its meaning. Frailty, thy name is a J 
pen! 

Adieu, adieu, remember me. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


37 


LETTER XIII. 

The letters? No, Beloved, I could not! Not 
yet. There you have caught me where I own I 
am still shy of you. 

A long time hence, when we are a safely wed- 
ded pair, you shall turn them over. It may be a 
short time; but I will keep them however long. 
Indeed I must ever keep them; they talk to me 
of the dawn of my existence, — the early light 
before our sun rose, when my love of you was 
growing and had not yet reached its full. 

If I disappoint you I will try to make up for 
it with something I wrote long before I ever saw 
you. To-day I was turning over old things my 
mother had treasured for me of my childhood — 
of days spent with her: things of laughter as well 
as of tears; such a dear selection, so quaint and 
sweet, with moods of her as I dimly remember 
her to have been. And among them was this ab- 
surdity, written, and I suppose placed in the mouth 
of my stocking, the Christmas I stayed with her 
in France. I remember the time as a great treat, 
but nothing of this. “ Nilgoes 99 is “ Nicholas,” 
you must understand ! How he must have laughed 
ovfcr me asleep while he read this ! 


38 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

“ Chere pere Nilgoes. S’il vous plait voulez vous me 
donne plus de jeux que des oranges des pommes et des 
pombons pare que nous allons faire l’arbre de noel cette 
anne et les jeaux ferait mieux pour l’arbre de Noel. II 
ne faut pas dire a petite mere s’il vous plait parce que 
je ne veut pas quelle sache sil vous voulez venir ce soir 
du ciel pour que vous pouvez me donner ee que je vous 
demande Dites bon jour a la St. Viearge est a l’enfant 
Jeuses et a Ste Joseph. Adieu cher St. Nilgoes.” 

I haven’t altered the spelling, I love it too well, 
prophetic of a fault I still carry about me. How 
strange that little bit of invocation to the dear 
folk above sounds to me now ! My mother must 
have been teaching me things after her own per- 
suasion; most naturally, poor dear one — though 
that too has gone like water off my mind. It was 
one of the troubles between her and mv father: 
the compact that I was to he brought up a Cath- 
olic was dissolved after they separated; and I am 
sorry, thinking it unjust to her; yet glad, con- 
tent with being what I am. 

I must have been less than five when I penned 
this: I was always a letter-writer, it seems. 

It is a reproach now from many that I have 
ceased to be: and to them I fear it is true. That 
L have not truly ceased, “ witness under my hand 
these presents,” — or whatever may be the proper 
legal terms for an affidavit. 

What were y'ou like, Beloved, as a very small 
child? Should I have loved you from the begin- 
ning had we toddled to the rencounter ; and would 
jny love have passed safety through the “gallous 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


39 


young hound 99 period ; and could I love you more 
now in any case, had I all your days treasured up 
in my heart, instead of less than a year of them ? 

How strangely much have seven miles kept our 
fates apart ! It* seems uncharacteristic for this 
small world, — where meetings come about so far 
above the dreams of average — to have played us 
such a prank. 

This must do for this once, Beloved; for be- 
hold me busy to-day: with what, I shall not tell 
you. I would like to put you to a test, as ladies 
did their knights of old, and hardly ever do now 
— fearing, I suppose, lest the species should alto- 
gether fail them at the pinch. I would like to 
see if you could come here and sit with me from 
beginning to end, with your eyes shut: never 
once opening them. I am not saying whether I 
think curiosity, or affection, would make the at- 
tempt too difficult. But if you were sure you 
could, you might come here to-morrow — a day 
otherwise interdicted. Only know, having come, 
that if you open those dear cupboards of vision 
and set eyes on things not yet intended to be looked 
at, there will be confusion of tongues in this 
Tower we are building whose top is to reach 
heaven. Will you come? I don’t say “come”; 
I only want to know — will you ? 

To-day my love flies low over the earth like a 
swallow before rain, and touching the tops of the 
flowers has culled you these. Kiss them until 
they open: they are full of my thoughts, as the 
wprld ; to me ; is full of you, 


40 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XIV. 

Own Dearest, — Come I did not- think that } t ou 
would, or mean that you should seriously; for is 
it not a poor way of love to make the object of it 
cut an absurd or partly absurd figure? I wrote 
only as a woman having a secret on the tip of 
her tongue and the tips of her fingers, and full of 
a longing to say it and send it. 

Here it is at last : love me for it, I have worked 
so hard to get it done! And you do not know 
why and what for? Beloved, it — this — is the 
anniversary of the day we first met ; and you have 
forgotten it already or never remembered it: — 
and yet have been clamoring for “ the letters ” ! 

On the first anniversary of our marriage, if 
you remember it, you shall have those same let- 
ters: and not otherwise. So there they lie safe 
till doomsday! 

The M. A. has been very gracious and dear after 
her little outbreak of yesterday: her repentances, 
after I have hurt her feelings, are so gentle and 
sweet, they always fill me with compunction. 
Finding that I would go on with the thing I was 
doing, she volunteered to come and read to me: 
a requiem over the bone of contention which we 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


41 


had gnawed between us. Was not that pretty and 
charitable? She read Tennyson’s Life for a solid 
hour, and continued it to-day. Isn’t it funny that 
she should take up such a book ? — she who “ can’t 
abide” Tennyson or Bi owning or Shakespeare: 
only likes Byron, I suppose because it was the 
right and fashionable liking when she was young. 
Yet she is plodding through the Life religiously 
— only skipping the verses. 

I have come across two little specimens of 
“ Death and the child ” in it. His son, Lionel, 
was carried out in a blanket one night in the 
great comet year, and waking up under the stars 
asked, “ Am I dead ? ” Number two is of a little 
girl at Wellington’s funeral who saw his charger 
carrying his boots, and asked, “ Shall I be like 
that after I die ? ” 

A queer old lady came to lunch yesterday, a 
great traveler, though lame on two crutches. We 
carefully hid all guide-books and maps, and held 
our peace about next month, lest she should insist 
on coming too: though I think Nineveh was the 
place she was most anxious to go to, if the M. A. 
would consent to accompany her ! 

Good-by, dearest of one-year-old acquaint- 
ances ! you, too, send your blessing on the anni- 
versary, now that my better memory has reminded 
you of it ! All that follow we will bless in com- 
pany. I trust you are one-half as happy as I am, 
my own, my own. 


42 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XV. 

You told me, dearest, that I should find your 
mother formidable. It is true; I did. She is a 
person very much in the grand pagan style : I 
admire it, hut 1 cannot flow in that scrt of com- 
pany, and I think she meant to crush me. You 
were very wise to leave her to come alone. 

I like her: I mean I believe that under that 
terribleness she has a heart of gold, which once 
opened would never shut : but she has not opened 
it to me. I believe she could have a great charity, 
that no evil-doing would dismay her : “ stanch ’’ 
sums her up. But I have done nothing wrong 
enough yet to bring me into her good graces. 
Loving her son, even, though, I fear, a great of- 
fense, has done me no good turn. 

Perhaps that is her inconsistency: women are 
sure to be inconsistent somewhere : it is their 
birthright. 

I began to study her at once, to find you: it 
did not take long. How I could love her, if she 
would let me ! 

You know her far far better than I, and want 
no advice: otherwise I would say — never praise 
me to her* quote my follies * rather ! To give 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


43 


ground for her distaste to revel in will not deepen 
me in her bad books so much as attempts to warp 
her judgment. 

1 need not go through it all : she will have 
told you all that is to the purpose about our meet- 
ing. She bristled in, a brave old fighting figure, 
announcing compulsion in every line, but with all 
her colors flying. She waited for , the door to 
close, then said, “ My son has bidden me come, I 
suppose it is my duty; he is his own master now. ’ 

We only shook hands. Our talk was very little 
of you. 1 showed her alLthe horses, the dogs, and 
the poultry; she let the inspection appear to con- 
clude with myself : asked me my habits, and said 
I looked healthy. I owned I felt it. “ Looks and 
feelings are the most deceptive things in the 
world,” she told me; adding that “ poor stock ” 
got more than its share of these. And when she 
said it I saw quite plainly that she meant me. 

I wonder where she gets the notion : for we are 
a long-lived race, both sides of the . family. I 
guessed that she would like frankness, and was as 
frank as I could be, pretending no deference to 
her objections. “ You think yon suit each 
other?” she asked me. My answer, “He suits 
me ! ” pleased her maternal palate, I think. 
“ Any girl might say that ! ” she admitted. (She 
might indeed !) 

This is the part of our interview she will not 
have repeated to you. 

I was due at Hillyn when she was preparing to 


44 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


go : Aunt N came in, and I left her to do the 

honors while I slipped on my habit. I rode by 
your mother’s carriage as far as the Greenway, 
where we branched. I suppose that is what her 
phrase means that you quote about my “ making 
a trophy of her,” and marching her a prisoner 
across the borders before all the world! 

I do like her: she is worth winning. Can one 
say warmer of a future mother-in-law who stands 
hostile ? 

All the same it was an ordeal. I believe I have 
wept since: for Benjy scratched my door often 
yesterday evening, and looked most wistful when 
I came out. Merely paltry self-love, dearest: — I 
am so little accustomed to not being — liked. 

I think she will be more gracious in her own 
house. I have her formal word that I am to come. 
Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you 
shall meet me, and take me to see her. There is 
something in her opposition that I can’t fathom: 
I wondered twice was lunacy her notion: she 
looked at me so hard. 

My mother’s seclusion and living apart from us 
was not on that account. I often saw her: she 
was very dear and sweet to me, and had quiet 
eyes the very reverse of a person mentally de- 
ranged. My father, I know, went to visit her 
when she lay dying; and I remember we all wore 
mourning. My uncle has told me they had a deep 
regard for each other: but disagreed, and were 
independent enough to choose living apart. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


45 


I do not remember my father ever speaking of 
her to ns as children : but I am sure there was no 
state of health to be concealed. 

Last night I was talking to Aunt N about 

her. “ A very dear woman/’ she told me, “ but 
your father was never so much alive to her worth 
as the rest of us.” Of him she said, “ A dear, 
fine fellow: but not at all easy to get on with.” 
Him, of course, I have a Continuous recollection 
of, and “ a fine fellow ” we did think him. My 
mother comes to me more rarely, at intervals. 

Don’t talk me down your mother’s throat: but 
tell her as much as she cares to know of this. I 
am very proud of my “ stock ” which she thinks 
poor ” ! 

Dear, how much I have written on things which 
can never concern us finally, and so should not 
ruffle us while they last ! Hold me in your heart 
always, always; and the world may turn adamant 
to me for aught I care! Be in my dreams to- 
night ! 


46 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER XVI. 

But, Dearest, — When I think of you I never 
question whether what I think would be 'true or 
false in the eyes of others. All that concerns you 
seems to go on a different plane where evidence 
has no meaning or existence: where nobody ex- 
ists or means anything, but only we two alone, 
engaged in bringing about for ourselves the still 
greater solitude of two into one. Oh, Beloved, 
what a company that will be ! Take me in your 
arms, fasten me to your heart, breathe on me. 
Deny me either breath or the light of day: I am 
yours equally, to live or die at your word. I shut 
my eyes to feel your kisses falling on me like rain, 
or still more like sunshine, — yet most of all like 
kisses, my own dearest and best beloved ! 

Oh, we two ! how wonderful we seem ! And to 
think that there have been lovers like us since the 
world began : and the world not able to tell us 
one little word of it: — not well, so as to be be- 
lieved — or only along with sadness where Fate 
has broken up the heavens which lay over some 
pair of lovers. G^none’s cry, “ Ah me, my moun- 
tain shepherd,” tells us of the joy when it has 
vanished, and most of all I get it in that song of 
wife and husband which ends: — 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


47 


“ Not a word for you, 

Not a lock or kiss, 

Good-bye. 

We, one, must part in two 
Verily death is this * 

I must die.” 

It was a woman wrote that: and we get love 
there ! Is it only when joy is past that we can 
give it its full expression? Even now, Beloved, I 
break down in trying to say how I love you. I 
cannot put all my joy into my words, nor all my 
love into my lips, nor all my life into your arms, 
whatever way I try. Something remains that I 
cannot express. Believe, dearest, that the half 
has not yet been spoken, neither of my love for 
you, nor of my trust in you, — nor of a w r ish that 
seems sad, but comes in a very tumult of happi- 
ness — the wish to die so that some unknown good 
may come to you out of me. 

Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly ! I 
love you now too much for your heart not to carry 
me to its grave, though I should die now, and you 
live to be a hundred. I pray you may ! I cannot 
choose a day for you to die. J am too grateful to 
life which has given me to you to say — if I were 
dying — “ Come with me, dearest ! ” Though, how 
the words tempt me as I write them ! — Come 
with me, dearest: yes, come! Ah, but you kiss 
me more, I think, when we say good-by than when 
meeting; so you will kiss me most of all when I 
have to die : — a thing in death to look forward to ! 


48 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


And, till then, — life, life, till I am out of my 
depth in happiness and drown in your arms! 

Beloved, that I can write so to you, — think 
what L means; what you have made me come 
through in the way of love, that this, which I 
could not have dreamed before, comes from me 
with the thought of you ! You told me to be still 
— to let you “ worship ” : I was to write back ac- 
ceptance of all your dear words. Are you never 
to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do 
not know how, for I cannot move from where I 
am! Do you feel where my thoughts kiss you? 
You would he vexed with me if I wrote it down, 
so I do not. And after all, some day, under a 
bright star of Providence, I may have gifts for 
you after my own mind which will allow me to 
grow proud. Only now all the giving comes from 
you. It is I who am enriched by your love, be- 
yond knowledge of my former self. Are you 
changed, dearest, by anything I have done? 

My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, 
and all these thoughts are loose leaves that fly 
after you when I have to remain behind. Dear 
lover, what short visits yours seem ! and the 
Mother- Aunt tells me they are most unconscion- 
ably long. — You will not pay any attention to 
that, please: forever let the heavens fall rather 
than that a hint to such foul effect should grow 
operative through me ! 

This brings you to me so far as it can: — such 
little words off so great a body of — “ liking” 


LOVE-LETTERS. 49 

shall I call it ? My paper stops me : it is my last 
sheet: I should have to go down to the library to 
get more — else I think I could not cease writing. 

More love than I can name. — Ever, dearest, 
your own. 

4 


SO \ AN ENGLISHWOMAN'^ 


LETTER XYII. 

Dearest, — Do I not write you long letters? It 
reveals my weakness. 1 have thought (it had been 
coming on me, and now and then had broken out 
of me before I met you) that, left to myself, I 
should have become a writer of books — I scarcely 
can guess what sort — and gone contentedly into 
middle-age with that instead of this as my raison 
d'etre . 

How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and 
say — “ But for you, I had been this quite other 
person, whom I have no wish to be now ! ” Be- 
loved, your heart is the shelf where I put all my 
uncut volumes, wondering a little what sort of a 
writer I should have made ; and chiefly wondering, 
would you have liked me in that character? 

There is one here in the family who considers 
me a writer of the darkest dye, and does not ap- 
prove of it. Benjy comes and sits most mourn- 
fully facing me when I settle down on a sunny 
morning, such as this, to write: and inquires, 
with all the dumbness a dog is capable of — “ What 
has come between us, that you fill up your time 
and mine with those cat’s-claw scratchings, when 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


51 


you should be in your woodland dress running 
[with] me through damp places ? ” 

Having written this sentimental meaning into 
his eyes, Ifnd Benjy still sitting watching me, I 
was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and 
took him to see his mother’s grave. At the bottom 
of the long walk is our dog’s cemetery : — no tomb- 
stones, but mounds; and a dogrose grows there 
and flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy 
as a child to have it planted: and I declare to 
you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if 
it knew that it had relations of a higher species 
under its keeping. Benjy, too, has a profound 
air of knowing, and never scratches for bones 
there, as he does in other places. What horror, 
were I to find him digging up his mother’s skele- 
ton? Would my esteem for him survive? 

When we got there to-day, he deprecated my 
choice of locality, asking what I had brought him 
there for. I pointed out to him the precise mound 
which covered the object of his earliest affections, 
and gathered you these buds. Are they not a deep 
color for wild ones? — if their blush remains a 
fixed state till the post brings them to you. 

Through what flower would you like best to be 
passed back, as regards your material atoms, 
into the spiritualized side of nature, when we 
have done with ourselves in this life? No single 
flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations. 
You and I would put our heads together under- 
ground and evolve a new flower — “ carnation, lily. 


52 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


lily, rose” — and send it up one fine morning 
for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical 
learned names to. What an end to our cosy floral 
collaboration that would be ! 

Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. 
This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be 
paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes, 
— and , I hope, healing; for I believe you are 
seedy, and that that is what is behind it. You 
notice I have not complained. Dearest, how could 
I ! My happiness reaches to the clouds — that * ~ 
to where things are not quite clear at present, 
love you no more than I ought : yet far more tin 
I can name. Good night and good morning.- 
Your star, since you call me so. 



LOVE-LETTERS. 


53 


LETTER XVIII. 

Dearest, — Xot having had a letter from you this 
morning, I have read over some back ones, and 
find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, 
to tell you what I do all day. Was that to avoid 
the too great length of my telling you what I 
think ? Yet you get more of me this way than 
that. What I do is every day so much the same: 
while what I think is always different. However, 
since you want a woman of action rather than of 
brain, here I start telling you. 

I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of 
Nan-nan’s drawing of the blinds: wait till she is 
gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it is her 
most possessive moment of me in the day, except 
w'hen I sham headaches, and let her put me to 
bed) ; then I have my hand under my pillow and 
draw out your last for a reading that has lost 
count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty- 
second time; — discover new beauties in it, and 
run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself 
— find them; Benjy comes up with the post’s 
latest, and behold, my day is begun ! 

Is that the sort of thing you want to know? 


6 4 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


My days are without an action worth naming: I 
only think swelling thoughts, and write some of 
them : if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure 
I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No, it is 
man who does things; a woman only diddles (to 
adapt a word of diminutive sound for the oc- 
casion), unless, good, fortunate, independent 
thing, she W'orks for her own living: and that is 
not me ! 

I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between 
me and a whole conception of life; because I 
have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and 
' Benjy, and last of all you — shutting me out fiom 
the realities of existence. 

If you would all leave me just for one full 
moon, and come back to me only when I was starr- 
ing for you all — for my tea to be brought to me in 
the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings 
which bolster me up from morning till night — 
with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back 
into your arms, and would let you draw the rose- 
colored curtains round me again ! 

Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: 
I am leaning so far out of window to welcome the 
dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall — heaven itself 
to fall upon me. 

What /lo I know truly, who only know so much 
happiness ? 

Dearest, if there is anything else in love which 
I do not know, teach it me quickly: I am utterly 
yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


55 


Only let me have with it the consciousness of 
your love. 

Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so 
much. What would life have without you in it? 
The sun would drop from my heavens. I see 
only by you ! you have kissed me on the eyes. 
You are more to me than my own poor brain could 
ever have devised : had I started to invent Para- 
dise, I could not have invented you. But perhaps 
you have invented me: I am something new to 
myself since I saw you first. God bless you for 
it ! 

Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now 
■ — though I might go blind, you could not unmake 
me: — “ The gods themselves cannot recall their 
gifts.” Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, 
I will trust: and so, not to be recalled! 

Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written 
this ! I am yours, Beloved. I kiss you again and 
again. — Ever your own making. 


56 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XIX. 

Dearest, Dearest, — How long has this hap- 
pened? You don’t tell me the day or the hour. 
Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have 
been in pain and grief for four days: and I not 
knowing anything about it ! And you have no 
hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate 
by it one small word to poor me ? What heartless 
merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry 
you, when soothing was the one thing wanted? 
Well, I will not worry now, then; neither at not 
being told, nor at not being allowed to come : but 
I will come thus and thus, 0 my dear heart, and 
take you in my arms. And you will be comforted, 
will you not be? when I tell you that even if you 
had no legs at all, I would love you just the same. 
Indeed, dearest, so much of you is a superfluity: 
just your heart against mine, and the sound of 
your voice, would carry me up to more heavens 
than I could otherwise have dreamed of. I may 
say now, now that I know it was not your choice, 
what a void these last few days the lack of letters 
has been to me. I wondered, truty, if you had 
found it well to put off such visible signs for a 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


57 


while in order to appease one who, in other things 
more essential, sees yon rebellious. But the won- 
der is over now; and I don’t want you to write — 
not till a consultation of doctors orders it for the 
good of your health. I will be so happy talking 
to you: also I am sending you books: — those I 
wish you to read ; and which now you must , since 
you have the leisure ! And I for my part will 
make time and read yours. Whose do you most 
want me to read, {hat my education in your likings 
may become complete ? What I send you will not 
deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful 
complete set — your gift — and shall read side by 
side with you to realize in imagination what the 
happiness of reading them for a first time ought 
to be. 

Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic instinct, I 
went out for a long tramp on my two feet ; and no 
ache in them came and told me of you ! Over 
Sillingford I sat on a bank and looked downhill 
where went a carter. And I looked uphill where 
lay something which might be nothing — or not 
his. Now, shall I make a fool of myself by pur- 
suing to tell him he may have dropped something, 
or shall I go on and see? So I went on and saw 
a coat with a fat pocket: and by then he was out 
of sight, and perhaps it wasn’t his; and it was 
very hot and the hill steep. So I minded my own 
business, making Cain’s motto mine ; and now feel 
so bad, being quite sure that it was his. And I 
wonder how many miles he will have tramped 


58 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


back looking for it, and whether his dinner was 
in the pocket. 

These unintentional misdoings are the “ sins n 
one repents of all one’s life long: I have others 
stored away, the bitterest of small things done or 
undone in haste and repented of at so much 
leisure afterwards. And always done to people 
or things I had no grudge against, sometimes 
even a love for. They are my skeletons : I will 
tell you of them some day. 

This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from 
each other; and I feel it almost more hard on me 
than on you. Beloved, let us lay our hearts to- 
gether and get comforted. It is not real separa- 
tion to know that another part of the world con- 
tains the rest of me. Oh, the rest of me, the rest 
of me that you are ! So, thinking of you, I cai* 
never be tired. I rest yours. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


50 


f 

LETTER XX. 

Yes, Dearest, “ Patience ! 99 but it is a virtue I 
have little enough of naturally, and used to be 
taught to pray for as a child. And I remember 
once really hurting dear Mother-Aunt’s feelings 
by trying to repay her for that teaching by a little 
iniquitous laughter at her expense. It was too 
funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do 
sometimes over quite small things, or I would not 
be telling it you now (for there are things in me 
I would conceal even from you). I daresay you 
wouldn’t guess it, but the M. A. is a most long 
person over her private devotions. Perhaps it 
was her own habit, with the cares of a household 
sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to 
me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, 
constantly interrupted over her prayers by mun- 
dane matters, became a pattern in patience out 
of these snippings of her godly desires. So, one 
day, angels in the disguise of cross people with 
selfish demands on her time came seeking to know 
where in her composition or composure exaspera- 
tion began : and finding none, they let her return 
in peace to her missal, where for a reward all the 
letters had been turned into gold. “And that, 
my dear, comes of patience,” my aunt would say, 


60 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


till I grew a little tired of the saying. I don’t 
know what experience my uncle had gathered of 
her patience under like circumstances : but I 
notice that to this day he treads delicately, like 
Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees ; and 
prefers then to send me on his errands instead of 
doing them himself. 

So it happened one day that he wanted a par- 
ticular coat which had been put away in her 
clothes-closet — and she was on her knees between 
him and it, with the time of her Amen quite in- 
definite. I was sent, said my errand briefly, and 
was permitted to fumble out her keys from her 
pocket while she continued to kneel over her 
morning psalms. 

What I brought to him turned out to be the 
wrong coat: I went back and knocked for read- 
mittance. Long-sufferingly she bade me to come 
in. I explained, and still she repressed herself, 
only saying in a tone of affliction, “ Do see this 
time that you take the right one ! ” 

After I had made my second selection, and 
proved it right on my uncle’s person, the parallel- 
ism of things struck me, and I skipped back to my 
aunt’s door and tapped. I got a low wailing 
“ Yes ? ” for answer — a monosyllabic substitute 
for the “ How long, 0 Lord ? ” of a saint in diffi- 
culties. When I called through the keyhole, “ Are 
your psalms written in gold ? ” she became really 
angry: — I suppose because the miracle so well 
earned had not come to pass. 


LOVE-LETTEKS. 


61 


Well, dearest, if you have been patient with me 
over so much about nothing, I pray this letter 
may appear to you written in gold. Why I write 
so is, partly, that it is bad for us both to be down 
in the mouth, or with hearts down at heel : and so, 
since you cannot, I have to do the dancing: — 
and, partly, because I found I had a bad temper 
on me which needed curing, and being brought 
to the sun-go-doyrn point of owing no man any- 
thing. Which, sooner said, has finally been done ; 
and I am very meek now and loving to you, and 
everything belonging to you — not to come nearer 
the sore point. 

And I hope some day, some day, as a reward to 
my present submission, that you will sprain your 
ankle in my company (just a very little bit for 
an excuse) and let me have the nursing of it ! 
It hurts my heart to have your poor bones crying 
out for comfort that I am not to bring to them. 
I feel robbed of a part of my domestic training, 
and may never pick up what 1 have just lost. 
And I fear greatly you must have been truly in 
pain to have put, off Meredith for a da} r . If I 
had been at hand to read to you, I flatter myself 
you would have liked him well, and been soothed. 
You must take the will, Beloved, for the deed. I 
kiss you now, as much as even you can demand; 

when you get this I will be thinking of you 
afl over again. — When do I ever leave off? Love, 
love, love, till our next meeting, and then more 
love still, and more ! — Ever your own. 


62 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXI. 

Dearest, — I am in a simple mood to-da} r , and 
give you the benefit of it: I shall become compli- 
cated again presently, and you will hear from me 
directly that happens. 

The house only emptied itself this morning; I 
may say emptied, for the remainder fits like a 
saint into her niche, and is far too comfortable 

to count. This is C , whom you only once 

met, when she sat so much in the background that 
you will not remember her. She has one weak- 
ness, a thirst between meals — the blameless thirst 
of a rabid teetotaler. She hides cups of cold tea 
about the place, as a dog its bones: now and then 
one gets spilled or sat on, and when she hears of 
the accident, she looks thirsty, with a thirst which 
only that particular cup of tea could have 
quenched. In no other way is she any trouble: 
indeed, she is a great dear, and has the face of a 
Madonna, as beautiful as an apocryphal gospel to 
look at and “ make believe ” in. 

Arthur, too, like the rest of them, when he 
came over to give me his brotherly blessing, 
wished to know what you were like. I didn’t 
pretend to remember your outward appearance too 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


Go 

well, — told him you looked like a common or 
garden Englishman, and roused his suspicions by 
so careless a championship of my choice. He ac- 
cused me of being in reality highly sentimental 
about you, and with having at that moment your 
portrait concealed and strung round my neck in a 
locket. Mother-Aunt stood up for me against 
him, declaring I was u too sensible a girl for non- 
sense of that sort.” (It is a little weakness of 
hers, you know, to resent extremes of endearment 
towards any one but herself in those she has 
brooded,” and she has thonght us hitherto most 
restrained and proper — as, indeed, have we not 
been?) Arthur and I exchanged tokens of truce: 
in a little while off went my aunt to bed, leaving 
us alone. Then, for he is the one of -us thsrt I am 
most frank with : “ Arthur,” cried I, and up came 
your little locket like a bucket from a well, for 
him to have his first sight of you, my Beloved. 
He objected that he could not see faces in a nut- 
shell; and I suppose others cannot: only I. 

He, too, is gone. If you had been coming he 
would have spared another day — for to-day was 
planned and dated, you will remember — and we 
would have ridden half-way to meet you. But 
as fate has tripped you, and made all comings on 
your part indefinite, he sends you his hopes for 
a later meeting. 

How is your poor foot? I suppose, as it is ill, 
I may send it a kiss by post and wish it well ? I 
do. Truly, you are to let me know if it gives you 


<u 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


much pain, and I will lie awake thinking of you. 
This is not sentimental, for if one knows that a 
fiiend is occupied over one’s sleeplessness one 
feels the comfort. 

I am perplexed how else to give you my com- 
pany: your mother, I know, could not yet truly 
welcome me: and I wish to be as patient as pos- 
sible, and not push, for favors that are not offered. 
So I cannot come and ask to take you out in her 
carriage, nor come and carry you away in mine. 
We must try how fast we can hold hands at a dis- 
tance. 

I have kept up to where you have been reading 
in Richard Feverel , though it has been a scramble : 
for I have less opportunity of reading, I with my 
feet, than you without yours. In your book I have 
just got to the smuggling away of General Monk 
in the perforated coffin, and my sense of history 
capitulates in an abandonment of laughter. I 
yield ! The Gaul’s invasion of Britain always be- 
comes broad farce when he attempts it. This in 
clever ludicrousness beats the unintentional com- 
edy of Victor Hugo’s “ John- Jim- Jack ” as a 
name typical of Anglo-Saxon christenings. But 
Dumas, through a dozen absurdities, knows ap- 
parently how to stalk his quarry : so large a genius 
may play the fool and remain wise. 

You see I have given your author a warm wel- 
come at last: and what about you and mine? 
Tell me you love his women and I will not be 
jealous. Indeed, outside him I don’t know where 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


65 


to find a written English woman of modern times 
whom I would care to meet, or could feel hon- 
estly hound to look up to : — nowhere will I have 
her shaking her ringlets at me in Dickens or 
Thackeray. Scott is simply not modern ; and 
Hardy’s women, if they have nobility in them, 
get so cruelly broken on the wheel that you get 
but the wrecks of them at last. It is only his 
charming baggages who come to a good ending. 

I like an author who has the courage and self- 
restraint to leave his noble creations alive: too 
many try to ennoble them by death. For my part 
if I have to go out of life before you, I would 
gladly trust you to the hands of Clara, or Rose, 
or J anet, or most of all Vittoria ; though, to be 
accurate, I fear they have all grown too ofd for 
you by now. 

And you ? have you any men to offer me in 
turn out of 3'our literary admirations, supposing 
you should die of a snapped ankle? Would you 
give me to d’Artagnan for instance? Hardly, I 
suspect ! But either choose me some proxy hero, 
or get well and come to me ! You will be very 
welcome when you do. Sleep is making sandy 
eyes at me: good-night, dearest. 

5 


66 


AN ENGLISHWOMANS 


LETTER XXII. 

Why, my Beloved, — Since you put it to me as 
a point of conscience (it is only lying on your 
back with one active leg doing nothing, and the 
other dying to have done aching, which has made 
you take this new start of inquiring within upon 
everything), since you call on me for a conscien- 
tious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I 
love you more than you love me, because there is 
so much more of you to love, let alone fit for 
loving. 

Do you imagine that you are going to be a 
cripple for life, and therefore an indifferent danc- 
er in the dances I shall always be leading you, 
that you have started this fit of self-depreciation? 
Or is it because I have thrown Meredith at your 
sick head that you doubt my tact and my affec- 
tion, and my power patiently to bear for your 
sake a good deal of cold shoulder? ^ Dearest, re- 
member I am doctoring you from a distance : and 
am not yet allowed to come and see my patient, 
so can only judge from your letters how ill you 
are. That you have been concealing from me 
almost treacherously: and only by a piece of ab- 
ject waylaying did I receive word to-day of your 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


67 


sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symp- 
toms. Lay by Meredith, then, for a while: I am 
sending you a cargo of Stevenson instead. You 
have been truly unkind, trying to read what re- 
quired effort, when you were fit for nothing of 
the sort. 

And lest even Stevenson should be too much for 
you, and wanting very much, and perhaps a little 
bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I 
am letting my last large bit of shyness of you go ; 
and with a pleasant sort of pain, because I know 
I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open 
my hands and let you have these, and with them 
goes my last blush: henceforth I am a woman 
without a secret, and all your interests in me may 
evaporate. Yet I know well it will not. 

As for this resurrection pie from love’s dead- 
letter office, you will find from it at least one 
thing — how much I depended upon response from 
you before I could become at all articulate. It is 
you, dearest, from the beginning who have set my 
head and heart free and made me a woman. I 
am something quite different from the sort of 
child I was less than a year ago when I wrote 
that small prayer which stands sponsor for all 
that follows. How abundantly it has been an- 
swered, dearest Beloved, only I know: you do 
not ! 

Now my prayer is not that you should “ come 
true/’ but that you should get well. Do this one 
little thing for me, dearest! For you I will do 



68 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


anything: my happiness waits for that. As 
yet I seem to have done nothing. Oh, but, Be- 
loved, I will ! From a reading of the Fioretti, 

I sign myself as I feel. — Your glorious poor little 7 
one. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


69 


THE CASKET LETTERS. 


A. 

ray dear Prince Wonderful. 

Pray God bless and make him come true 

for my sake. Amen. 

R. S. V. P. 


B. 

Dear Prince Wonderful, — Now that I have met 
you I pray that you will be my friend. I want 
just a little of your friendship, but that, so much, 
so much ! And even for that little I do not know 
how to ask. 

Always to be your friend: of that you shall 
be quite sure. 

1 The MS. contained at first no name, but a blank : 
over it this has been written afterwards in a small 
hand. 


70 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


C. 

Dear Prince Wonderful, — Long ago when I 
was still a child I told myself of you : but thought 
of you only as in a fairy tale. Now I am afraid 
of trusting my eyes or my ears, for fear I should 
think too much of you before I know you really 
to be true. Do not make me wish so much to be 
your friend, unless 3-011 are also going to be true ! 

Please come true now, for mine and for all the 
world’s sake: — but for mine especially, because 
I thought of you first ! And if you are not able 
to come true, don’t make me see you any more. 
I shall always remember you, and be glad that I 
have seen you just once. 


D. 


Dear Prince Wonderful, — Has God blessed you 
yet and made you come true? I have not seen 
you again, so how am I to know? Not that it is 
necessary for me to know even if you do come 
true. I believe already that you are true. 

If I were never to see you again I should be 
glad to think of you as living, and shall always 
be your friend. I pray that you may come to 
know that. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


71 


E. 

Dear Highness, — I do not know what to write 
to you : I only know how much I wish to write. I 
have always written the things I thought about: 
it has been easy to find words for them. How I 
think about you, but have no words: — no words, 
dear Highness, for you ! I could write at once if 
I knew you were my friend. Come true for me: 
I will have so much to tell you then ! 


F. 

Dear Highness, — If I believe in fairy talcs com- 
ing true, it is because I am superstitious. This is 
what I did to-day. I shut my eyes and took a 
book from the shelf, opened it, and put my fingers 
down on a page. This is what I came to : 

“ All I believed is true ! 

I am able yet 
All I want to get 
By a method as strange as new : 

Dare I trust the same to you ? ” 

Fate says, then, you are to be my friend. Fate 
has said I am yours already. That is very certain. 
Only in real life where things come true would 
g book have opened as this has done. 


72 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


G. 

Dear Highness, — I am sure now, then, that I 
please you, and that you like me, perhaps only a 
little: for }>ou turned out of your way to ride 
with me though you were going somewhere so fast. 
How much I wished it when I saw you coming, 
hut dared not believe it would come true ! 

“ Come true ” : it is the word I have always 
been writing, and everything has : — you most of 
all ! You are more true each time I see you. So 
true that now I will write it ’down at last, — the 
truth for you who have come so true. 

Dear Highness and Great Heart, I love you 
dearly, though you don’t know it, — quite ever so 
much; and am going to love you ever so much 
more, only — please like me a little better firstJ 
You on your dear side must do something : or, be- 
fore I know, I may be wringing my hands all alone 
on a desert island to a bare blue horizon, with 
nothing in it real or fabulous. 

If I am to love you, nothing but happiness is 
to be allowed to come of it. So don’t come true 
too fast without one little wee corresponding wish 
for me to find that you are! I am quite happy 
thinking you out slowly : it takes me all day long ; 
the longer the better ! 

I wonder how often in my life I shall write 
down that I love you, having once written it (I do: 
— I love you ! there [it] is for you, with more to 
follow after!); and send you my love as I do 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


73 


now into the great emptiness of chance, hoping 
somehow, known or unknown, it may bless you 
and bring good to you. 

Oh, but Tis a windy world, and I a mere feather 
in it: how can I get blown the way I would? 

Still I have a superstition that some star is 
over me which I have not seen yet, but shall, — 
Heaven helping me. 

And now good might, and no more, no more at 
all ! I send out an “ I love you ” to be my ce- 
lestial commercial traveler for me while I fold 
myself up and become its sleeping partner. 

Good night: you are the best and truest that I 
ever dreamed yet. 


H. 

Hear Highness, — I begin not to be able to name 
you anything, for there is not a word for you 
that will do ! “ Highness 99 you are : but that 

leaves gaps and coldnesses without end. “Royal,” 
yet much more serene than royal: though by that 
I don’t mean any detraction from your royalty, 
for I never saw a man carry his invisible crown 
with so level a head and no haughtiness at all: 
and that is the finest royalty of look possible. 

I look at you and wonder so how you have 
grown to this — to have become king so quietly 
without any coronation ceremony. You have 
thought more than you should for happiness at 


74 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


your age; making me, by that one line in your 
forehead, think you were three years older than 
you really are. I wish — if I dare wish you any- 
thing different — that you were ! It makes me un- 
comfortable to remember that I am — what? Al- 
most half a year your elder as times flies: — not 
realty, for your brain was born long before mine 
began to rattle in its shell. You say quite old 
things, and quietly, as if you had had them in 
your mind ten years already. When you told me 
about your two old pensioner^, the blind man and 
his wife, whom you brought to so funny a recon- 
ciliation, I felt (“ mir war, ich wuszte nicht wie ”) 
that I would like very much to go blindfold led 
by you: it struck me suddenly how happy would 
be a blindfoldness of perfect trust such as one 
might have with your hands on one. I suppose 
that is what in religion is called faith: I haven’t 
it there, my dear; but I have it in you now. I 
love you, beginning to understand why: at first 
I did not. I am ashamed not to have discovered 
it earlier. The matter with you is that you have 
goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of good- 
ness, I mean: — a different thing from there be- 
ing a whereabouts for goodness in you; that we 
all have in some proportion or another. I was 
quite right to love you : I know it now, — I did 
not when I first did. 

Yesterday I was turning over a silty “ confes- 
sion book ” in which a rose was everybody’s favor- 
ite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man ; 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


n 

and womanliness for a woman (which is as much 
as to say that pig is the best quality for pork, 
and pork for pig) : till I came upon one differ- 
ent from the others, and found myself saying, 
“ Yes ” all down the page. 

I turned over for the signature, and found my 
own mother’s. Was it not a strange sweet meet- 
ing ? And only then did the memory of her 
handwriting from far hack come to me. She 
died, dear Highness, before I was seven years old. 
I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as 
something very sweet, hardly as a real person. 

I noticed she loved best in men and women 
what they lack most often : in a man, a fair mind ; 
in a woman, courage. “ Brave women and fair 
men,” she wrote. Byron might have turned in 
his grave at having his dissolute stiff-neck so 
wrung for him by misquotation. And she — it 
must have been before the ’eighties had started the 
popular craze for him — chose Meredith, my own 
dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our 
tastes would have run together had she lived ! 

Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave 
— constitutionally, so that I can’t help it: and 
this, therefore, is not self-praise. But fairness in 
a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now 
to discover. You have it fixed fast in you. 

You, I think, began to do just things con- 
sciously, as the burden of manhood began in you. 
I love to think of you growing by degrees till you 
could carry your head so — and no other way; so 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


76 


01 


that, looking at you, I can promise myself you 
never did a mean thing, and never consciously an 
unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy 
that fault in you. But, whatever — I love you for 
it more and more, and am proud knowing you and 
finding that we are to become friends. For it is 
that, and no less than that, now. 

I love you ; and me you like cordially : and that 
is enough. I need not look behind it, for already 
I have no way to repay you for the happiness this 
brings me. 


I. 


Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear ; and it takes 
long thinking. Not merely such a quantity of 
thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a day’s 
work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. 
Bless me, dearest ; all to-day has belonged to you ; 
and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours 
without the asking: just as without the asking I 
too am yours. I wish it were more possible for 
us to give service to those we love. I am most 
glad because I see you so often: but I come and 
go in your life empty-handed, though I have so 
much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, 
I give you: I cannot empty my brain of them. 
Some day you shall think well of me. — That is a 
vow, dear friend, — you whom I love so much ! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


77 


J. 

I have not had to alter any thought I ever formed 
about you, Beloved; I have only had to deepen 
it — that is all. You grow, but you remain. I 
have heard people talk about you, generally kind- 
ly; but what they think of you is often wrong. 
I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure 
that I know you better. If my mind is so clear 
about you, it shows that you are good for me. 
Now for nearly three months I may not see you 
again: but all that time you will be growing in 
my heart; and at the end without another word 
from you I shall find that I know you better than 
before. Is that strange? It is because I love 
you: love is knowledge — blind knowledge, not 
wanting eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in 
your memory the kind place you have given me. 
You are almost my friend now, and I know it. 
You do not know that I love you. 


K. 

Beloved, — You love me ! I know it now, and 
bless the sun and the moon and the stars for the 
dear certainty of -it. And I ask you now, 0 heart 
that has opened to me, have I once been unhappy 
or impatient while this good thing has been with- 
held from me ? Indeed my love for you has occu- 
pied me too completely: I have been so glad to 


78 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


find how much there is to learn in a good heart 
deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have 
emplo}'ed me as I wish I may be employed all the 
days of my life: and now my beloved employer 
has given me the wages I did not ask. 

You love me ! Is it a question of little or much? 
Is it not rather an entire new thought of me that 
has entered your life, as the thought of you en- 
tered mine months that seem years ago? It was 
the seed then, and seemed small; but the whole 
life was there; and it has g^own and grown till 
now it is I who have become small, and have 
hardly room in me for the roots: and it seems to 
have gone so far up over my head that I wonder 
if the stars know of my happiness. 

They must know of yours too, then, my Be- 
loved: they are no company for me without you. 
Oh, to-day, to-day of all days ! how in my heart 
I shall go on kissing it till I die! You love me: 
that is wonderful ! You love me : and already it 
is not wonderful in the least ! but belongs to 
Noah and the ark and all the animals saved up 
for an earth washed clean and dried, and the new 
beginnings of time which have ever since been 
twisting and turning with us in safe keeping 
through all the history of the world. 

“We came over at the Norman conquest,” my 
dear, as people say trailing their pedigree: but 
there was no ancestral pride about us — it was all 
for the love of the thing we did it : how clear it 
seems now ! In the hall hangs a portrait in a big 


LOVE-LETTERS. M 

wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a 
man who flouted the authority of James II. mere- 
ly because he was so like my father in character 
that he could do nothing else. I shall look for 
you now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong 
from your helmet down the middle of your face 
— of which that line on your forehead is the re- 
mainder. And you love me ! I wonder what the 
line has to do with that? 

By such little things do great things seem to 
come about not really. I know it was not be- 
cause I said just what I did say, and did what 
I did yesterday, that your heart was bound to 
come for mine. But it was those small things 
that brought you consciousness: and when we 
parted I knew that I had all the world at my feet 
- — or all heaven over my head ! 

Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to 
you from me, and not be ashamed or think myself 
forward since I have your love. All this time 
you are thinking of me : a certainty lying far out- 
side what I can see. 

Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any 
words, it is here! If silence goes better with it, 
— speak, silence, for me when I end now ! 

Good night, and think greatly of me ! I shall 
wake early. 


80 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


L. 

Dearest, — Was my heart at all my own, — was 
it my own to give, till } r ou came and made me 
aware of how much it contains? Truty, dear, it 
contained nothing before, since now it contains 
you and nothing else. So I have a brand-new 
heart to give away: and you, } r ou want it and 
can’t seq that there it is staring you in the face 
like a rose with all its petals ready to drop. 

I am quite sure that if I had not met you, I 
could have loved nobody as I love you. Yet it is 
very likely that I should have loved — sufficiently 
as the way of the world goes. It is not a romantic 
confession, but it is true to life : I do so genuinely 
like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not 
happy except where shoulders rub socially : — 
that is to say, have not until now been happ}^, ex- 
cept dependency on the company and smiles of 
others. Now, Beloved, I have none of your com- 
pany, and have had hut few of your smiles (I 
could count them all) ; yet I have become more 
happy filling up my solitude with the understand- 
ing of you which has made me wise, than all the 
rest of fate or fortune could make me. Down 
comes autumn’s sad heart and finds me gay ; and 
the asters, which used to chill me at their appear- 
ing, have come out like crocuses this '"ear because 
it is the beginning of a new world. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


81 


And all the winter will carry more than a sus- 
picion of summer with it, just as the longest days 
carry round light from northwest to northeast, 
because so near the horizon, but out of sight, lies 
their sun. So you, Beloved, so near to me now at 
last, though out of sight. 


M. 

Beloved, — Whether I have sorry or glad things 
to think about, they are accompanied and changed 
by thoughts of you. You are my diary: — all goes 
to you now. That you love me is the very light 
by which I see everything. Also I learn so much 
through having you in my thoughts : I cannot say 
how it is, for I have no more knowledge of life 
than I had before: — yet I am wiser, I believe, 
knowing much more what lives at the root of 
things and what men have meant and felt in all 
they have done because I love you, dearest. 
Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have 
more joy and more fear in me than I had before. 
And if this seems to be all about myself, it is all 
about } r ou realty. Beloved ! 

Last week one of my dearest old friends, our 
Rector, died: a character you too would have 
loved. He was a. father to the whole village, 
rather stern of speech, and no respecter of per- 
sons. Yet he made a very generous allowance for 
those who did not go through the church door to 
6 


AN ENGLISHWOMANS 


83 

find their salvation. I often went only because I 
loved him; and he knew it. 

I went for that reason alone last Sunday. The 
whole village was full of closed blinds: and of 
all things over him Chopin’s Funeral March was 
played! — a thing utterly unchristian in its mean- 
ing: wild pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty. 
“ Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead ! ” it cried : 
and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not 
Balder at alL Too many thorns have been in 
your life, but not the mistletoe stroke dealt by a 
blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there 
is the Balder element: and I feared lest some- 
thing might slay it for me, and my life become 
a cry like Chopin’s march over mown-down un- 
ripened grass, and youth slain in high places. 

After service a sort of processional instinct 
drew people up to the house: they waited about 
till permission was given, and went in to look at 
their old man, lying in high state among hi& 
books. I did not go. Beloved, I have never yet 
seen death : you have, I know. Do you, I wonder, 
remember your father better than I mine: — or 
your brother? Are they more living because you 
saw them once not living? I think death might 
open our eyes to those we lived on ill terms with, 
but not to the familiar and dear. I do not need 
you dead, to be certain that your heart has mine 
for its true inmate and mine yours. 

I love you, I love you: so let good night bring 
you good morning! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


83 


At long intervals, dearest, I write to you a secret 
all about yourself for my eyes to see: because, 
chiefly because, I have not you to look at. Thus 
1 bless myself with you. 

Away over the world west of this and a little 
bit north is the city of spires where you are now. 
Never having seen it I am the more free to pic- 
ture it as I like: and to me it is quite full of you: 
— quite greedily full, Beloved, when elsewhere 
you are so much wanted ! I send my thoughts 
there to pick up crumbs for me. 

It is a strange blend of notions — wisdom and 
ignorance combined: for you I seem to know per- 
fectly; but of your life nothing at all. And yet 
nobody there knows so much about you as I. 
What you do matters so much less than what you 
are. You, who are the dearest heart in all the 
world, do what you will, you are so still to me, 
Beloved. 

I take a happy armful of thoughts about you 
into all my dreams: and when I wake they are 
there still, and have done nothing but remain 
true. What better can I ask. of them? 

You do love me: you have not changed ? With- 
out change I remain yours so long as I live. 


84 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


0 . 

And you, Beloved, what are you thinking of me 
all this while? Think well of me, I beg you: I 
deserve so much, loving you as truly as I do ! 

So often, dearest, I sit thinking my hands into 
yours again as when we were saying good-by the 
last time. Then it was, under our laughter and, 
light words, that I saw suddenly how the thing 
too great to name had become true, that from 
friends we were changed into lovers. It seemed 
the most natural thing to be, and yet was wonder- 
ful — for it was I who loved you first: a thing I 
could never be ashamed of, and am now proud to 
own — for lies it not proved me wise? My love 
for you is the best wisdom that I have. Good 
night, dearest! Sleep as well as I love you, and 
nobody in the world will sleep so soundly. 


P. 

A few times in my life, Beloved, I have had the 
Blue-moon-hunger for something which seemed 
too impossible and good ever to come true : prosaic 
people call it being “in the blues"; I comfort 
myself with a prettier word for it. To-day, not 
the Blue-moon itself, but the Man of it came 
down and ate plum-porridge with me! Also, I 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


sr> 


do believe that it burnt his mouth, and am quite 
reasonably happy thinking so, since it makes me 
know that you love me as much as ever. 

If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been 
of myself, lest I might be unworthy of your 
friendship or love. Suspicions of you I never 
had. 

Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are 
like bats among birds, flying only by twilight? 

But even my doubts have been thoughts, Be- 
loved, — sure of you if not always of myself. And 
if I have looked for you only with doubtful 
vision, yet I have always seen you in as strong a 
light as my eyes could bear blue-moonlight, 
Beloved, is not twilight: and blue-moonlight ha^ 
been the light I saw you by: it is you alone who 
can make sunlight of it. 

This I read yesterday has lain on my mind 
since as true and altogether beautiful, with the 
beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it 
was a minor poet who wrote it. It is of a wood 
where Apollo has gone in quest of his Beloved, 
and she is not yet to be found : — * 

“ Here each branch * 

Swayed with a glitter all its crowded leaves, 

And brushed the soft divine hair touching them 
In ruffled clusters. . . . 

Suddenly the moon 

Smoothed herself out of vapor-drift and made 
The deep night full of pleasure in the eye 
Of her sweet motion. Not alone she came 


8G 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


Leading the starlight with her like a song ; 

And not a bud of all that undergrowth 
But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge 
As the light steeped it ; over whose massed leavr 
The portals of illimitable steep * 

Faded in heaven.” 

That is love in its moonrise, not its sunrise 
stage: yet you see, Beloved, how it takes posses- 
sion of its dark world, quite as fully as the 
brighter sunlight could do. And if I speak of 
doubts, I mean no twilight and no suspicions: 
nor by darkness do I mean any unhappiness. 

My blue-moon has come, leading the starlight 
with her like a song. Am I not happy enough to 
he patiently yours before you know it? Good 
things which are to be, before they happen are 
already true. Nothing is so true as you are, ex- 
cept my love for you and yours for me. Good 
night, good night. 

Sleep well, Beloved, and wake. 


Q. 

Beloved, — I heard somebody yesterday speak of 
you as “ charming ” ; and I began wondering to 
myself was that the word which could ever have 
covered my thoughts of you? I do not know 
whether you ever charmed me, except in the sense 
of charming which means magic and spell-bind- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


87 


ing. That you did from the beginning, dearest. 
But I think I held you at first in too much awe to 
discover charm in you: and at last knew you too 
much to the depths to name you by a word so 
lightly used for the surface of things. Yet now 
a charm in you, which is not all you, but just a 
part of you, comes to light, when I see you won- 
dering whether you are really loved, or whether, 
Beloved, I only like you rather well ! 

Well, if you will be so “ charming,” I am help- 
less: and can do nothing, nothing, but pray for 
the blue-moon to rise, and love you a little better 
because you have some of that divine foolishness 
which strikes the very wise ones of earth, and 
makes them kin to weaker mortals who otherwise 
might miss their “ charm ” altogether. 

Truly, Beloved, if I am happy, it is because I 
am also your most patiently loving. 


R. 

Beloved, — The certainty which I have now that 
you love me so fills all my thoughts, I cannot 
understand you being in any doubt on your side. 
What must I do that I do not do, to show glad- 
ness when we meeirand sorrow when we have to 
part? I am sure that I make no pretense or dis- 
guise except that I do not stand and wring my 
hands before all the world, and cry, “ Don’t go ! ” 


88 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


— which has sometimes been in my mind, to he 
kept not said ! 

Indeed, I think so mnch of yon, my dear, that 
I believe some day, if yon do your part, you will 
only have to look up from your books to find me 
standing. If you did, would you still be in doubt 
whether I loved you ? 

Oh, if any apparition of me ever goes to you, 
all my thoughts will surely look truthfully out of 
its eyes; and even you will read what is there at 
last ! 

Beloved, I kiss your blind eyes, and love them 
the better for all their unreadiness to see that I 
am already their slave. Not a day now but I 
think I may see you again : I am in a golden un- 
certainty from hour to hour. 

I love you: you love me: a mist of blessing 
swims over my eyes as I write the words, till they 
become one and the same thing: I can no longer 
divide their meaning in my mind. Amen: there 
is no need that I should. 


S. 

Beloved, — I have not written to you for quite a 
long time: ah, I could not. I have nothing now 
to say! I think I could very easily die of this 
great happiness, so certainly do you love me ! 
Just a breath more of it and I should be gone. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


89 


Good-by, dearest, and good-by, and good-by! 
If you want letters from me now, you must ask 
for them! That the earth contains us both, and 
that we love each other, is about all that I have 
mind enough to take in. I do not think I can 
love you more than I do: you are no longer my 
dream but my great waking thought. I am wait- 
ing for no blue-moonrise now: my heart has not 
a wish which you do not fulfil. I owe you my 
whole life, and for any good to you must pay it 
out to the last farthing, and still feel myself your 
debtor. 

Oh, Beloved, I am most poor and most rich 
when I think of your love. Good night; I can 
never let thought of you go ! 

Beloved, — These are almost all of them, but not 
quite ; a few here and there have cried to be taken 
out, saying they were still too shy to be looked at. 
I can’t argue with them: they know their own 
minds best; and you know mine. 

See what a digified historic name I have given 
this letter-box, or chatter-box, or whatever you 
like to call it. But “ Resurrection Pie” is my 
name for it. Don’t eat too much of it, prays your 
loving. 


90 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXIII. 

Saving your presence, dearest, I would rather 
have Prince Otto, a very lovable character for 
second affections to cling to. Richard Feverel 
would never marry again, so I don’t ask for him: 
as for the rest, they are all too excellent for me. 
They give me the impression of having worn 
copy-books under their coats, when they were boys, 
to cheat punishment: and the copy-books got 
beaten into their systems. 

You must find me somebody who was a “ gal- 
lous young hound ” in the days of his youth — 
Crossjay for instance: — there! I have found the 
very man for me ! 

But really and truty, are you better? It will 
not hurt your foot to come to me, since I am not 
to come to you? How I long to see you again, 
dearest ; it is an age ! As a matter of fact, it is 
a fortnight; but I dread lest you will find some 
change in me. I have kept a real white hair to 
show you, I drew it out of my comb the other 
morning: wound up into a curl it becomes quite 
visible, and it is ivory-white : you are not to think 
it flaxen, and take away its one wee sentiment ! 
Ancl I make you an offer; — you shall have it if. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


91 


honestly, yon can find in your own head a white 
one to exchange. 

Dearest, I am not hurt , nor do I take seriously 
to heart your mother’s present coldness. How 
much more I could forgive her when I put myself 
in her place ! She may well feel a struggle and 
some resentment at having to give up in any de- 
gree her place with you. All my selfishness would 
come to the front if that were demanded of me. 

Do not think, because I leave her alone, that 
I am repaying her coldness in the same coin. I 
know that for the present anything I do must 
offend. Have I demanded your coming too soon ? 
Then stay away another day — or two: every day 
only piles up the joy it will be to have your arms 
round me once more. I can keep for a little 
longer: and the gray hair will keep, and many 
to-morrows will come bringing good things for 
us, when perhaps your mother’s “ share of the 
world ” will be over. 

Don’t say it, but when you next kiss her, kiss 
her for me also: I am sorry for all old people: 
their love of things they are losing is so far more 
to be reverenced and made room for than ours of 
the things which will come to us in good time 
abundantly. 

To-night I feel selfish at having too much cf 
your love : and not a bit of it can I let go ! I 
hope, Beloved, we shall live to see each other’s 
gray hairs in earnest: gray hairs that we shall 
not laugh at, as at this one I pulled. How dark 


92 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


your dear eyes will look with a white setting ! My 
heart’s heart, every day yon grow larger round 
me, and I so much stronger depending upon you ! 

I won’t say — come for certain, to-morrow: but 
come if, and as soon as, you can. I seem to see a 
mile further when I am on the look-out for you: 
and I shall be long-sighted every day until you 
come. It is only doubtful hope deferred which 
maketh the heart sick. I am as happy as the day 
is long waiting for you : but the day is long, dear- 
est, none the less when I don’t see you. 

All this space on the page below is love. I 
have no time left to put it into words, or words 
into it. You bless my thoughts constantly. — 
Believe me, never your thoughtless. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


93 


LETTER XXIV. 

Dearest, — How, when, and where is there any 
use wrangling as to which of us loves the other 
the best (“the better,” I believe would be the 
more grammatical phrase in incompetent Queen’s 
English), and why in that of all things should 
we pretend to be rivals? For this at least seems 
certain to me, that, being created male and fe- 
male, no two lovers since the world began ever 
loved each other quite in the same way: it is not 
in nature for it to be so. They cannot compare: 
only to the best that is in them they do love each 
after their kind, — as do we for certain ! 

Be sure, then, that I am utterly contented with 
what I get (and you, Beloved, and you?) : nay, 
I wonder forever at the love you have given me: 
and if I will to lay mine at your feet, and feel 
yours crowning my life, — why, so it is, you know; 
you cannot alter it ! And if you insist that your 
love is at my feet, I have only to turn Irish and 
reply that it is because I am heels over head in 
love with you: — and, mark you, that is no pretty 
attitude for a lady that you have driven me into 
in order that I may stick to my “ crown ” ! 

Go to, dearest ! There is one thing in which I 


D4 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

can beat you, and that is in the bandying of words 
and . all verbal conjurings: take this as the last 
proof of it and rest quiet. I know you love me a 
great great deal more than I have wit or power to 
love you: and that is just the little reason why 
your love mounts till, as I tell you, it crowns me 
(head or heels) : while mine, insufficient and grov- 
eling, lies at your feet, and will till they become 
amputated. And I can give you, but won’t, sixty 
other reasons why things are as I say, and are to 
be left as I say. And oh, my world, my world, it is 
with you I go round sunwards, and you make my 
evenings and mornings, and will, till Time shuts 
his wings over us ! And now it is doleful business 
I have to write to you. . . . 

I have dropped to sleep Over all this writing of 
things, and my cheek down on the page has made 
the paper unwilling to take the ink again: — what 
a pretty compliment to me: and, if you prefer it, 
what an easy way of writing to you ! I can send 
you such any day and be as idle as I like. And 
you will decide about all the above exactly as you 
and I think best (or should it be “ better ” again, 
being only between us two?). When you get this, 
blow your beloved self a kiss in the glass for me, 
— a great big shattering blow that shall astonish 
Mercury behind his window-pane. Good night, 
my best — or “ better,” for that is what I most 
want you to be. 


LOVE LETTERS. 


05 


LETTER XXV. 

My own Beloved, — And I never thanked you 
yesterday for your dear words about the resurrec- 
tion pie^ that comes of quarreling ! Well, you 
must prove them and come quickly that I may see 
this restoration of health and spirits that you as- 
sure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you 
to sleep ; but I suppose that is what you mean. 

Fate meant me only to light upon gay things 
this morning: listen to this and guess where it 
comes from : — 

“ When March with variant winds was past, 

And April had with her silver showers 
Ta’en leif at life with an orient blast ; 

And lusty May, that mother of flowers, 

Had made the birds to begin their hours, 

Among the odors ruddy and white, 

Whose harmony was the ear’s delight ; 

In bed at morrow I sleeping lay ; 

Methouglit Aurora, with crystal een, 1 
In at the window looked by day, 

And gave me her visage pale and green ; v 
And on her hand sang a lark from the sjdene, 

‘ Awake ye lovers from slumbering ! 

See how the lusty morrow doth spring ! ’ ” 


96 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your 
own tongue ! That is Dunbar, a Scots poet con- 
temporary of Henry VII., just a little bit altered 
by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I 
had not had to leave an archaic word here and 
there, would you have ever guessed he lay outside 
this century? That shows the permanent element 
in all good poetry, and in all good joy in things 
also. In the four centuries since that was written 
we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning 
of certain words, as for instance “ spleen,” which 
now means irritation and vexation, hut stood then 
for quite the opposite — what we should call, I sup- 
pose, “ a full heart.” It is what I am always say- 
ing — a good digestion is the root of nearly all the 
good living and high thinking we are capable of : 
and the spleen was then the root of the happy 
emotions as it is now of the miserable ones. 
Your pre-Reformation lark sang from “ a full 
stomach,” and thanked God it had a constitution 
to carry it off without affectation; and your nine- 
teenth century lark applying the same code of 
life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, 
and not poetry at all as we try to make it out to 
be. 

I have no news for you at all of any one: all 
inside the house is a simmer of peace and quiet, 
with blinds drawn down against the heat the 
whole day long. No callers; and as for me, I 
never call elsewhere. The gossips about here eke 
out a precarious existence by washing each other’s 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


97 


dirty linen in public : and the process never seems 
to result in any satisfactory cleansing. 

I avoid saying what news I trust to-morrow’s 
post-bag may contain for me. Every wish I send 
you comes “from the spleen,” which means I am 
very healthy, and, conditionally, as happy as is 
good for me. Pray God bless my dear Share of 
the world, and make him get well for his own and 
my sake ! Amen. 

This catches the noon post, an event which al- 
ways shows I am jubilant, with a lot of the op- 
posite to a “ little death ” feeling running over my 
nerves. I feel the grass growing under me: the 
reverse of poor Keats’s complaint. Good-by, Be- 
loved, till I find my way into the provender of to- 
morrow’s post-bag. 

7 


98 


AN ENGLISHWOMANS 


LETTER XXVI. 

Oh, wings of the morning, here you come ! I 
have been looking out for you ever since post 
came. Roberts is carrying orders into town, and 
will bring you this with a touch of the hat and an 
amused grin under it. I saw you right on the top 
• of Sallis Hill : this is to wager that my eyes have 
told me correctly. Look out for me from far 
away, I am at my corner window : wave to me ! 
Dearest, this is to kiss you before I can. 


LCVE-LETTEBS. 


99 




LETTER XXVII. * 

Dearest, — I have made a bad beginning of the 
week : I wonder how it will end ? it all comes of 
my not seeing enough of you. Time hangs heavy 
on my hands, and the Devil finds me the mis- 
chief ! 

I prevailed upon myself to go on Sunday and 
listen to our new lately appointed vicar: for I 
thought it not fair to condemn him on the strength 

of Mrs. P ’s terrible reporting powers and her 

sensuous worship of his full-blown flowers of 
speech — “ pulpft-pot-plants ” is what I call them. 

It was all not worse and not otherwise than I 
had expected. I find there are only two kinds of 
clerics as generally necessary to salvation in a 
country parish — one leads his parishioners to the 
altar and the other to- the pulpit: and the latter is 
vastly the more popular among the articulate and 
gad-about members of his flock. This one sways 
himself over the edge of his frame, making sig- 
nals of distress in all directions, and with that 
and his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty 
minutes in a balloon-car, till he comes down to 
earth at the finish with the Doxology for a para- 
chute. His shepherd’s crook is one long note of 


100 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


interrogation, with which he tries to hook down 
the heavens to the understanding of his hearers, 
and his hearers up to an understanding of himself. 
All his arguments are put interrogatively, and few 
of them are worth answering. Well, well, I shall 
be all the freer for your visit when you come next 
Sunday, and any Sunday after that you will : and 
he shall come in to tea if you like and talk to you 
in quite a cultured and agreeable manner, as he 
can when his favorite beverage is before him. 

I discover that I get “ the snaps ” on a Monday 
morning, if I get them at all. The M. A. gets 
them on the Sunday itself, softly but regularly: 
they distress no one, and we all know the cause: 
her fingers are itching for the knitting which she 
mayn’t do. Your protestant ignores Lent as a 
popish device, a fond thing vainly invented: but 
spreads it instead over fifty-two days in the year. 
Why, I want to know, cannot I change the sub- 
ject? 

Sunday we get no post (and no collection ex- 
cept in church) unless we send down to the town 
for it, so Monday is all the more welcome: but 
this I have been up and writing before it arrives — 
therefore the “ snaps.” 

Our postman is a lovely sight. I watched him 
walking up the drive the other morning, and he 
seemed quite perfection, for I guessed he was 
bringing me the thing which would make me 
happy all day. I only hope the Government pays 
him properly. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


101 


I think this is the least pleasant letter I have 
ever sent you: shall I tell you why? It was not 
the sermon: he is quite a forgivable good man in 
his way. But in the afternoon that same Mrs. 

P came, got me in a corner and wanted to 

unburden herself of invective against your mother, 
believing that I should be glad, because her cold- 
ness to me has become known ! What mean things 
some people can think about one ! I heard noth- 
ing: but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want 
stroking. And my love to your mother, please, 
if she will have it. It is only through her that I 
get you. — Ever your very own. 


102 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXVIII. 

Dearest, — Here comes a letter to you from me 
flying in the opposite direction. I won’t say I am 
not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two 
places at once ! Give this letter, then, a special 
nesting-place, because I am so much on the wing 
elsewhere. 

I shut my eyes most of the time through 
France, and opened them on a soup-tureen full 
of coflee which presented itself at the frontier: 
and then realized that only a little way ahead lay 
Berne, with baths, buns, bears, breakfast, and 
other nice things beginning with B, waiting to 
make us clean, comfortable, contented, and other 
nice things beginning with C. 

Through France I loved you sleepy fashion, 
with many dreams in between not all about you. 
But now I am breathing thoughts of you out of a 
new atmosphere — a great gulp of you, all clean- 
living and high-thinking between these Alpine 
royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their 
heads: and no time for a word more about any- 
thing except you : you, and double-you, — and 
treble-you J the alphabet only had grace to con- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


103 


tain so beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet 
next, perhaps, out of Lucerne: if not, — Italy. 

What a lot I have to go through before we meet 
again visibly! You will find me world-worn, my 
Beloved! Write often. 



104 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXIX. 

Beloved, — You know of the method for making 
a cat settle down in a strange place by buttering 
her all over : the theory being that by the time she 
has polished off the butter she feels herself at 
home? My morning’s work has been the butter- 
ing of the Mother-Aunt with such things as will 
Lucerne her the most. When her instincts are 
appeased I am the more free to indulge my own. 

So after breakfast we went round the cloisters, 
very thick set with tablets and family vaults, and 
crowded graves enclosed. It proved quite “ the 
best butter.” To me the penance turned out in- 
teresting after a period of natural repulsion. A 
most unpleasant addition to sepulchral sentiment 
is here the fashion: photographs of the departed 
set into the stone. You see an elegant and genteel 
marble cross : there on the pedestal above the name 
is the photo : — a smug man with bourgeois whisk- 
ers, — a militia-man with waxed mustaches well 
turned up, — a woman well attired and conscious 
of it: you cannot think how indecent looked the 
pretension of such types to the dignity of death 
and immortality. 

But just one or two faces stood the test, and 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


105 


were justified: a young man oppressed with the 
burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother 
in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a 
woman not beautiful but for her neck which car- 
ried indignation; her face had a thwarted look. 
“ Dead and rotten ” one did not say of these in 
disgust and involuntarily as one did of the others. 
And yet I don’t suppose the eye picks out the faces 
that kindled most kindness round them when liv- 
ing, or that one can see well at all where one sees 
without sympathy. I think the Mother-Aunt’s 
face would not look dear to most people as it does 
to me, — yet my sight of her is the truer: only I 
would not put it up on a tombstone in order that 
it might look nothing to those that pass by. 

I wrote this much, and then, leaving the M. A. 
to glory in her innumerable correspondence, 
Arthur and I went off to the lake, where we have 
been for about seven hours. On it, I found it 
become infinitely more beautiful, for everything 
was mystified by a lovely bloomy haze, out of 
which the white peaks floated like dreams: and 
the mountains change and change, and seem not 
all the same as going when returning. Don’t 
ask me to write landscape to you: one breathes 
it in, and it is there ever after, but remains unset 
to words. 

The T s whittle themselves out of our com- 

pany just to the right amount: come back at the 
light time (which is more than Arthur and I are 
lively to do when our legs get on the spin), and 


106 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


are duly welcome with a diversity of doings to 
talk about. Their tastes are more the M. A/s, 
and their activities about half-way between hers 
and ours, so we make rather a fortunate quintette. 

The M trio join us the day after to-morrow, 

when the majority of us will head away at once 
to Florence. • Arthur growls and threatens he 
means to be left behind for a week: and it suits 
the funny little jealousy of the M. A. well enough 
to see us parted for a time, quite apart from the 
fact that I shall then be more dependent on her 
company. She will then glory in overworking 
herself, — say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. 
No letter at all, dearest, this; merely talky-talky. 
— Yours without words. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


10 ? 


LETTER XXX. 

Dearest, — I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the 
majority had their way, and we simply skipped 
into it, got ourselves bumped down at the Duomo 
and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted 
to bed, and skipped out again by the first train 
next morning. Over the walls of the Campo 
Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli 
(don’t expect me ever to spell the names of dead 
painters correctly: it is a politeness one owes to 
the living, but the famous dead are exalted by 
being spelt phonetically as the heart dictates, and 
become all the better company for that greatest 
of unspelt and spread-about names — Shakspere, 
Shakspeare, Shakespeare — his mark, not himself). 
Such a long parenthesis requires stepping-stones 
to carry you over it : “ crumbs ” was the last 
(wasn’t a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in 
one of Andersen’s fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I 
hadn’t time to digest them properly. Let me come 
hack to them before I die, and bury me in that 
enclosure if you love me as much then as I think 
3 r ou do now. 

The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is won- 
derful, — a mirror of sound hung over the head of 


108 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


an official who opens his mouth for centimes to 
drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather 
you don't, for that is his perquisite), and they 
fly circling, and flock, and become a single chord 
stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are 
living inside what in the days of our youth would 
have been called “ the sound of a grand Amen." 

The cathedral has fine points, or more than 
points — aspects : but the Italian version of Gothic, 
with its bands of flat marbles instead of mold- 
ings, w^as a shock to me at first. I only begin to 
understand it now that I have seen the outside of 
the Duomo at Florence. Curiously enough, it 
doesn't strike me as in the least Christian, only 
civic and splendid, reminding me of what Ruskin 
says about church architecture being really a de- 
pendent on the feudal or domestic. The Strozzi 
Palace is a beautiful piece of street-architecture; 
its effect is of an iron hand which gives you a 
buffet in the face when you look up and wonder — 
how shall I climb in ? I will tell you more about 
insides when I write next. 

I fear my last letter to you from Lucerne may 
either have strayed, or not even have begun stray- 
ing : for in the hurry of coming away I left it, ad- 
dressed, I think , but unstamped; and I am not 
sure that that particular hotel will be Christian 
enough to spare the postage out of the bill, 
which had a galaxy of small extras running 
into centimes, and suggesting a red-tape recti- 
tude that would not show blind 25-centime 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


109 


gratitude to the backs of departed guests. So 
be patient and forgiving if I seem to have 
written little. I found two of yours waiting 
for me, and cannot choose between them which I 
find most dear. I will say, for a fancy, the 
shorter, that you may ever be encouraged to write., 
your shortest rather than none at all. One word 
from you gives me almost as much pleasure as 
twent} r , for it contains all your sincerity and 
truth; and what more do I want? You bless me 
quite. How many perfectly happy days I owe to 
you, and seldom dare dream that I have made 
any beginning of a return ! If I could take one 
unhappy day out of your life, dearest, the secret 
would be mine, and no such thing should be left 
in it. Be happy, beloved! oh, happy, happy, — 
with me for a partial reason — that is what I wish ! 


110 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER XXXI. 

Dearest, — The Italian paper-money paralyzes 
my brain: I cannot calculate in it; and were I 
left to myself an unscrupulous shopman could 
empty me of pounds without my becoming con- 
scious of it till I beheld vacuum. But the T s 

have been wonderful caretakers to me: and to- 
morrow Arthur rejoins- us, so that I shall be able 
to resume my full activities under his safe-con- 
duct. 

The ways of the Italian cabbies and porters 
fill me with terror for the time when I may have 
to fall alive and unassisted into their hands: they 
have neither conscience nor gratitude, and regard 
thievish demands when satisfied merely as step- 
ping-stones to higher things. 

Many of the outsides of Florence I seemed to 
know by heart — the Palazzo Yecchio for instance. 
But close by it Cellini’s two statues, the Judith 
^nd the Perseus, brought my heart up to my 
mouth unexpectedly. The Perseus is so out of 
proportion as to be ludicrous from one point of 
view: but another is magnificent enough to make 
me forgive the scamp his autobiography from now 
to the day of judgment (when we shall all begin 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


Ill 


forgiving each other in great haste, I suppose, for 
fear of the devil taking the hindmost ! ) , and .1 
registered a vow on the spot to that effect: — so 
no more of him here, henceforth, but good ! 

There is not so much color about as I had ex- 
pected: and austerity rather than richness is the 
note of most of the exteriors. 

I have not been allowed into the Uffizi y^et, so 
to-day consoled myself with the Pitti. Titian’s 
“ Duke of Norfolk ” is there, and I loved him, 
seeing a certain likeness there to somebody whom 
I — like. A photo of him will he coming to you. 
Also there is a very fine Lely-Vandyck of Charles 
I and Henrietta Maria, a quite moral painting, 
making a triumphant assertion of that martyr’s 
bad character. I imagine he got into Heaven 
through having his head cut off and cast from 
him: otherwise all of him would have perished 
along with his mouth. 

Somewhere too high up was hanging a ravish- 
ing Botticelli — a Madonna and Child bending 
over like a wind-blown tree to be kissed by St. 
John: — a composition that takes you up in its 
arms and rocks you as you look at it. Andrea del 
Sarto is to me only a big mediocrity: there is 
nothing here to touch his chortling child-Christ 
in our National Gallery. 

At Pisa I slept in a mosquito-net, and felt like 
a bride at the altar under a tulle veil which was 
too large for her. Here, for lack of that luxury, 
being assured that there were no mosquitoes to be 


112 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


had, I have been sadly ravaged. The creatures 
pick out all foreigners, I think, and only when 
they have exhausted the supply do they pass on to 

the natives. Mrs. T left one foot unveiled 

when in Pisa, and only this morning did the irri- 
tation in the part bitten begin to come out. 

I can now ask for a bath in Italian, and order 
the necessary things for myself in the hotel: also 
say “come in” and “thank you.” But just the 
few days of that very German table d'hote at 
Lucerne, where I talked gladly to polish myself 
up, have given my tongue a hybrid way of talk- 
ing without thinking : and I say “ ja, ja ” and 
“ nein ” and “ der, die , das ” as often as not be- 
fore such Italian nouns as I have yet captured. 
To fall upon a chambermaid who knows French 
is like coming upon my native tongue suddenly. 

Give me good news of your foot and all that i? 
above it: I am so doubtful of its being really 
strong yet; and its willing spirits will overcome 
it some day and do it an injury, and hurt my feel- 
ings dreadfully at the same time. 

Walk only on one leg whenever you think of 
me ! I tell you truly I am wonderfully little 
lonely: and yet my thoughts are constantly away 
with you, wishing, wishing, — what no word on 
paper can ever carry to you. It shall be at our 
next meeting! — All yours. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


113 


LETTER XXXII. 

My Dearest, — Florence is still eating np all my 
time and energies: I promised you there should he 
austerity and self-denial in the matter of letter- 
writing: and I know you are unselfish enough to 
expect even less than I send you. 

Girls in the street address compliments to 
Arthur’s complexion : — “ beautiful brown boy 99 
they call him: and he simmers over with vanity, 
and wishes he could show them his boating arms, 
brown up to the shoulder as well. Have you 
noticed that combination in some of the dearest 
specimens of young English manhood, — great 
physical vanity and great mental modesty? and 
each as transparently sincere as the other. 

The Bargello is an ideal museum for the stor- 
age of the best things out of the Middle Ages. 
It opens out of splendid courtyards and staircases, 
and ranges through rooms which have quite a 
feudal gloom about them; riiost of these are hung 
with bad late tapestries (too late at least for my 
taste), so that the gloom is welcome and charm- 
ing, making even “ Gobelins 99 quite bearable. I 
find quite a new man here to admire — Pollaiolo, 
both painter and sculptor, one of the school of 
8 


114 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


“ passionate anatomists/' as I call them, about 
the time of Botticelli, I fancy. He has one bust 
of a young Florentine which equals Verocchio on 
the same ground, and charms me even more. 
Some of his subjects are done twice over, in paint 
and bronze, but he is more really a sculptor, I 
think, and merely paints his piece into a picture 
from its best point of view. 

Yerocchio's idea of David is charming: he is a 
saucy fellow who has gone in for it for the fun of 
the thing — knew he could bring down a hawk 
with his catapult, and therefore why not a Goliath 
also? If he failed, he need but cut and run, and 
everybody ^ould laugh and call him plucky for 
doing even that much. So he does it, brings down 
his big game by good luck, and stands posing with 
a sort of irresistible stateliness to suit the result. 
He has a laugh something like “ little Dick’s," 
only more full of bubbles, and is saying to him- 
self, “ What a hero they all think me ! " He is 
the merriest of sly-dog hypocrites, and has thin, 
wiry arms and a craney neck. He is a bit like 
Tom Sawyer in character, more ornate and dra- 
matic than Huckleberry Finn, but quite as much a 
liar, given a good cause. 

Another thing that has seized me, more for its 
idea than actual carrying out, is an unnamed 
terra-cotta Madonna and Child. He is crushing 
himself up against her neck, open-mouthed and 
terrified, and she spreading long fingers all over 
his head and face. My notion of it is that it is 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


115 


the Godhead taking his first look at life from the 
human point of view; and he realizes himself 
“ caught in his own trap/’ discovering it to be 
ever so much worse than it had seemed from an 
outside view. It has a fine modern zeit-geist 
piece of declamation to come out of the rather 
over-sweet della Robbia period of art. 

There seems to have been a rage at one period 
for commissioning statues of David: so Donatello 
and others just turned to and did what they liked 
most in the way of budding youth, stuck a Go- 
liath* s head at its feet, and called it "David.” 
Verocehio is the exception. 

We are going to get outside Florence for a 
week or ten days ; it is too hot to be borne at night 
after a day of tiring activity. So we go to the 
D s* villa, which they offered us in their ab- 

sence ; it lies about four miles out, and is on much 
higher ground: address only your very immedi- 
ately next letter there, or it may miss me. 

There are hills out there with vineyards among 
them which draw me into wishing to be away 
from towns altogether. Much as I love what is 
to be found in this one, I think Heaven meant 
me to be “ truly rural ” ; which all falls in, dear- 
est, with what I mean to be ! Beloved, how little 
I sometimes can say to you ! Sometimes my heart 
can put only silence into the end of a letter; and 
with that I let this one go. — Yours, and so lov- 
ingly. 


116 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


r LETTER XXXIII. 

Beloved, — I had your last letter on Friday: all 
your letters have come in their right numbers. I 
have lost count of mine; but I think seven and 
two postcards is the total, which is the same as 
the numbers of clean and unclean beasts propor- 
tionately represented in the ark. 

Up here we are out of the deadliness of the 
heat, and are thankful for it. Vineyards and 
olives brush the eyes between the hard, upright 
bars of the cypresses: and Florence below is like 
a hot bath which we dip into and come out again. 
At the Riccardi chapel I found Benozzo Gozzoli, 
not in crumbs, but perfectly preserved: a proces- 
sion of early Florentine youths, turning into 
angels when they get to the bay of the window 
where the altar once stood. The more I see of 
them, the greater these early men seem to me: I 
shall be afraid to go to Venice soon; Titian will 
only half satisfy me, and Tintoretto, I know, will 
be actively annoying: I shall stay in my gondola, 
as your American lady did on her donkey after 
riding twenty miles to visit the ruins of — Carnac, 
was it not ? It is well to have the courage of one’s 
likings and dislikings, that is the only true cul- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


117 


ture (the state obtained by use of a “ coulter ” or 
cutter) — I cut many things severely which, no 
doubt, are good for other people. 

Botticelli I was shy of, because of the craze 
about him among people who know nothing: he is 
far more wonderful than I had hoped, both at the 
ITffizi and the Academia: but he is quite pagan. 
I don't know why I say “ but '' ; he is quite typical 
of the world's art-training: Christianity may get 
hold of the names and dictate the subjects, but 
the artist-breed carries a fairly level head through 
it all, and, like Pater's Mona Lisa, draws Chris- 
tianity and Paganism into one: at least, wherever 
it reaches perfect expression it has done so. Some 
of the distinctly primitives are different; their 
works enclose a charm which is not artistic. Fra 
Angelico, after being a great disappointment to 
me in some of his large set pictures in the Aca- 
demia and elsewhere, shows himself lovely in 
fresco (though I think the “ crumb " element helps 
him). His great Crucifixion is big altogether, 
and has so permanent a force in- its aloofness 
from mere drama and mere life. In San Marco, 
the cells of the monks are quite charming, a row 
of little square bandboxes under a broad raftered 
corridor, and in every cell is a beautiful little 
fresco for the monks to live up to. But they no 
longer live there now : all that part of San Marco 
has become a peep-show. 

I liked being in Savonarola's room, and was 
more susceptible to the remains of his presence 


118 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


than I have been to Michel Angelo or any one 
else’s. Michel Angelo I feel most when he has 
left a thing unfinished; then one can put one’s 
finger into the print of the chisel, and believe any- 
thing of the beauty that might have come out of 
the great stone chrysalis lying cased and roughed, 
waiting to be raised up to life. 

Yesterday Arthur and I walked from here to 
Fiesole, which we had neglected while in Florence 
— six miles going, and more like twelve coming 
back, all because of Arthur’s absurd cross-country 
instinct, which, after hours of river-bends, bare 
mountain tracks, and tottering precipices, brought 
us out again half a mile nearer Florence than 
when we started. 

At Fiesole is the only church about here whose 
interior architecture I have greatly admired, aus- 
tere but at the same time gracious— like a Ma- 
donna of the best period of painting. We also 
went to look at the Roman baths and theater : the 
theater is charming enough, because it is still 
there: but for the baths — oblongs of stone don’t 
interest me just because they are old. All stone is 
old: and these didn’t even hold water to give one 
the real look of the thing. Too tired, and even 
more too lazy, to write other things, except love, 
most dear Beloved. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


119 


LETTER XXXIV. 

Dearest, — We were to have gone down with the 
rest into Florence yesterday: but soft miles of 
Italy gleamed too invitingly away on our right, 
and I saw Arthur’s eyes hungry with the same 
far-away wish. So I said “ Prato,” and he ran up 
to the fattore’s and secured a wondrous shandry- 
dan with just space enough between its horns to 
toss the two of us in the direction where we would 
go. Its gaunt framework was painted a bright 
red, and our feet had only netting to rest on: so 
constructed, the creature was most vital and light 
of limb, taking every rut on the road with ilea- 
like agility. Oh, but it was worth it ! 

We had a drive of fourteen miles through hills 
and villages, and castellated villas with gardens 
shut in by formidably high walls — always a 
charm: a garden should always have something 
of the jealous seclusion of a harem. I am getting 
Italian landscape into my system, and enjoy it 
more and more. 

Prato is a little cathedral town, very like the 
narrow and tumble-down parts of Florence, only 
more so. The streets were a seething caldron of 
cattle-market when we entered, which made us 


120 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


feel like a tea-cup in a bull-ring (or is it thunder- 
storm?) as we drove through needle’s-eye ways 
bristling with agitated horns. 

The cathedral is little and good: damaged, of 
course, wherever the last three centuries have laid 
hands on it. At the corner of the west front is 
an out-door pulpit beautifully put on with a mush- 
room hood over its head. The main lines of the 
interior are finely severe, either quite round or 
quite flat, and proportions good always. An up- 
holstered priest coming out to say mass is gener- 
ally a sickening sight, so wicked and ugly in look 
and costume. The best-behaved people are the 
low-down beggars, who are most decoratively de- 
votional. 

We tried to model our exit on a brigand-beggar 
who came in to ask permission to murder one of 
his enemies. He got his request granted at one of 
the side-altars (some strictly local Madonna, I 
imagine), a~d his gratitude as he departed was 
quite touching. Having studiously copied his 
exit, we want to know whom we shall murder to 
pay ourselves for our trouble. 

It amuses me to have my share of driving over 
these free and easy and very narrow highroads. 
But A. has to do the collision-shouting and the 
cries of "Via ! ” — the horse only smiles when he 
hears me do it. 

Also did I tell you that on Saturday we two 
walked from here over to Fiesole — six miles there, 
and ten back: for why? — because we chose to go 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


12 T 


what Arthur calls “ a bee-line across country/’ 
having thought we had sighted a route from the 
top of Fiesole. But in the valley we lost it, and 
after breaking our necks over precipices and our 
hearts down cul-de-sacs that led nowhere, and 
losing all the ways that were pointed out to us, 
for lack of a knowledge of the language, we came 
out again into view of Florence about half a mile 
nearer than when we started and proportionately 
far away from home. When he had got me 
thoroughly foot-sore, Arthur remarked compla- 
cently, “ The right way to see a country is to lose 
yourself in it ! ” I didn’t feel the truth of it 
then: but applied to other things I perceive its 
wisdom. Dear heart, where I have lost myself, 
what in all the world do I know so well as you ?. 

Your most lost and loving. 


122 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXXV. 

Beloved, — Rain swooped down on us from on 
high during the night, and the country is cut into 
islands: the river from a rocky wriggling stream 
has risen into a tawny, opaque torrent that roars 
with a voice a mile long and is become quite un- 
fordable. The little mill-stream just below has 
broken its banks and poured itself away over the 
lower vineyards into the river; a lot of the vines 
look sadly upset, generally unhinged and un- 
strung, yet I am told the damage is really small. 
I hope so, for I enjoyed a real lash-out of weather, 
after the changelessness of the long heat. 

I have been down in Florence beginning to 
make my farewells to the many things I have 
seen too little of. We start away for Venice about 
the end of the week. At the TJffizi I seem to have 
found out all my future favorites the first day, 
and very little new has come to me; but most of 
them go on growing. The Raphael lady is quite 
wonderful ; I think she was in love with him, and 
her soul went into the painting though he himself 
did not care for her; and she looks at you and 
says, “ See a miracle : he was able to paint this, 
and never knew that I loved him ! ” It is wonder- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


123 


ful that; but I suppose it can be done, — a soul 
pass into a work and haunt it without its creator 
knowing anything about how it came there. Al- 
ways when I come across anything like that which 
has something inner and rather mysterious, I 
tremble and want to get back to you. You are the 
touchstone by which I must test everything that 
is a little new and unfamiliar. 

From now onwards, dearest, you must expect 
only cards for a time: it is not settled yet whether 
we stop at Padua on our way in or our way out. 
I am clamoring for Verona also; but that will be 
off our route, so Arthur and I may go there alone 
for a couple of greedy days, which I fear will only 
leave me dissatisfied and wishing I had had pa- 
tience to depend on coming again — perhaps with 
you! 

Uncle H. has written of your numerous visits 
to him, and I understand you have been very good 
in his direction. He does not speak of loneliness; 
and with Anna and her brood next week or now, 
he will be as happy as his temperament allows 
him to be when he has nothing to worry over. 

I am proud to say I have gone brown without 
freckles. And are you really as cheerful as you 
write yourself to be? Dearest and best, when is 
your holiday to begin; and is it to be with me? 
Does anywhere on earth hold that happiness for 
us both in the near future ? I kiss you well, Be- 
loved. 


124 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER NXXYI. 

Dearest, — Venice is round me as I write ! Well, 
I will not waste my Baedeker knowledge on yon, 
— yon too can get a copy; and it is not the pano- 
ramic view of things yon will be wanting from 
me: it is my own particular Venice I am to find 
ont and send yon. So first of all from the heart of 
it I send yon mine : when I have kissed yon I will 
go on. My eyes have been seeing so much that is 
new, I shall want a fresh vocabulary for it all. 
But mainly I want to say, let ns be here again to- 
gether quickly, before we lose any more of our 
youth or our two-handed hold on life. I get short 
of breath thinking of it ! 

So let it be here, Beloved, that some of our soon- 
to-be happiness opens and shuts its eyes : for truly 
Venice is a cleepy place. I am wanting, and 
taking, nine hours’ sleep after all I do. 

Outside coming oveT the flats from Padua, she 
looked something like a manufacturing town at its 
ablutions, — a smoky chimney well to the fore : but 
get near to her and you will find Her standing on 
turquoise, her feet set about with jaspers, and 
with one of her eyes she ravishes you : and all her 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


125 


campanile are like the “ thin flames ” of “ souls 
mounting up to God.” 

That is from without: within she becomes too 
sensuous and civic in her splendor to let me think 
much of souls. “Rest and be indolent” is the 
motto for the life she teaches. The architecture 
is the song of the lotos-eater built into stone- 
ware I in a more florid mood I would have said 
“ swan-song,” for the whole stands finished with 
nothing more to be added: it has sung itself out: 
and if there is a moral to it all, no doubt it is in 
Ruskin, and I don’t want to read it just now. 

What I want is you close at hand looking up at 
all this beauty, and smiling when I smile, which 
is your way, as if you had no opinions of your 
own about anything in which you are not a pro- 
fessor. So you will write and agree that I am to 
have the pleasure of this return to look forward 
to? If I know that, I shall be so much more 
reconciled to all the joy of the things I am seeing 
now for the first time: and shall see so much 
better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are 
here helping me. 

Here is love, dearest! help yourself to just as 
much as much as you wish for; though all that I 
send is good for you ! Ho letter from you since 
Florence, but I am neither sad nor anxious: only 
all the more your loving. 


126 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER XXXVII 

Beloved, — The weather is as gray as England to- 
day, and much rainier. To feel it on my cheeks 
and be back north with that and warmer things, I 
would go out in it in the face of protests, and had 
to go alone — not Arthur even being in the mood 
just then for a patriotic quest of the uncomfort- 
able. I had myself oared into the lagoons across 
a racing current and a driving head-wind which 
made my gondolier bend like a distressed poplar 
over his oar; patience on a monument smiling at 
backsheesh — “ all comes to him who knows.” 

Of course, for comfort and pleasure, and every- 
thing but economy, we have picked up a gondolier 
to pet : we making much of him, and he much out 
of us. He takes Arthur to a place where he can 
bathe — to use his own expression — “ cleanly,” that 
is to sa}q unconventionally; and this appropriately 
enough is on the borders of a land called “the 
Garden of Eden ” (being named so after its 
owners). He — “Charon” I call him — is large 
and of ruddy countenance, and talks English in 
blinkers — that is to say, gondola English — out of 
which he could not find words to summon me a 
cab even if it were not opposed to his interests. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


14 ? 

Still there are no cabs to be called in Venice, and 
he is teaching us that the shortest way is always 
by water. If Arthur is not punctually in his gon- 
dola by 7 a. m., I hear a call for the “ Signore 
Inglese ” go up to his window ; and it is hungry 
Charon waiting to ferry him. 

Yesterday your friend Mr. C called and 

took me over to Murano in a beautiful pair-oared 
boat that simply flew. There I saw a wonderful 
apse filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set 
a blue-black figure of the Madonna, ten heads 
high and ten centuries old, which almost made 
me become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands 
leaning up the bend with two pale hands lifted in 
ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor is all 
mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; 
the architecture classic in the grip of Byzantine 
Christianity, which is like the spirit of God mov- 
ing on the face 'of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesy- 
ing to the dry bones. 

The Colleoni is quite as much more beautiful 
in fact and seen full-size as I had hoped from all 
smaller reproductions. A fine equestrian figure 
always strikes one as enthroned, and not merely 
riding; if I can’t get that, I consider a centaur 
the nobler creature with its human body set down 
into the socket of the brute, and all fire — a candle 
burning at both ends : which, in a way, is what the 
centaur means, I imagine ? 

Bellini goes on being wonderful, and for me 
beats Raphael’s Blenheim Madonna period on its 


128 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


own ground. I hear now that the Raphael lady I 
raved over in Florence is no Raphael at all, — 
which accounts for it being so beautiful and in- 
teresting — to me, I hasten to add. Raphael’s 
studied calmness, his soul of “ invisible soap and 
imperceptible water,” may charm some; me it 
only chills or leaves unmoved. 

Is this more about art than you care to hear? 
I have nothing to say about myself, except that I 
am as happy as a cut-in-half thing can be. Is it 
any use sending kind messages to your mother? 
If so, my heart is full of them. Bless you, 
dearest, and good night. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


129 


LETTER XXXVIII. 

Dearest,— St. Mark’s inside is entirely different 
from anything I had imagined. I had expected 
a grove of pillars instead of these wonderful 
breadths of wall ; and the marble overlay I had not 
understood at all till I saw it. My admiration 
mounts every time I enter : it has a different gloom 
from any I have ever been in, more joyous and 
satisfying, not in the least moody as our own 
Gothic seems sometimes to be; and saints instead 
of devils look at you solemn-eyed from every 
comer of shade. 

A heavy rain turns the Piazza into a lake: this 
morning Arthur had to carry me across. Other 
foolish Englishwomen were shocked at such 
means, and paddled their own leaky canoes, or 
stood on the brink and looked miserable. The 
effect of rain-pool reflections on the inside of St. 
Mark’s is noticeable, causing it to bloom unex- 
pectedly into fresh subtleties and glories. The 
gold takes so sympathetically to any least tint of 
color that is in the air, and counts up the altar 
candles even unto its furthest recesses and cupolas. 

I think before I leave Venice I shall find about 
ten Tintorettos which I really like. Best of all is 
9 


136 AN ENGLISHWOMAN^ 

that Bacchus and Ariadne in the Ducal Palace, 
of which you gave me the engraving. His “ Mar- 
riage of St. Catherine,” which is there also, has 
all Veronese’s charm of color and what I call his 
“ breeding”; and in the ceiling of the Council 
Chamber is one splendid figure of a sea-youth 
striding a dolphin. 

Last evening we climbed the San Giorgio cam- 
panile for a sunset view of Venice; it is a much 
better point of view than the St. Mark’s one, and 
we were lucky in our sunset. Venice again looked 
like a beautified factory town, blue and blue with 
smoke and evening mists. Down below in the 
church I met a delightful Capuchin priest who 
could talk French, and a poor, very young lay- 
brother who had the holy custody of the eyes 
heavily upon his conscience when I spoke to him. 
I was so sorry for him! 

The Mother-Aunt is ill in bed ; but as she is at 
the present moment receiving three visitors, you 
will understand about how ill. The fact is, she is 
worn to death with sight-seeing. I can’t stop her ; 
■while she is on her legs it is her duty, and she 
will. The consequence is I get rushed through 
things I want to let soak into me, and have to 
go again. My only way of getting her to rest has 
been by deserting her; and then I come back and 
receive reproaches with a meek countenance. 

Mr. C has been good to us and cordial, 

and brings his gondola often to our service. A 
gondola and pair has quite a different motion 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


131 


from a one-oared gondola; it is like riding a sea- 
horse instead of a sea-camel — almost exciting, 
only it is so soft in its prancings. 

He took A. and myself into the procession which 
welcomed the crowned heads last Wednesday; 
the hurly-burly of it was splendid. We tore down 
the Grand Canal from end to end, almost cheek 
by jowl with the royalties; the M. A. was quite 
jubilant when she heard we had had such “ good 
places.” Hundreds of gondolas swarmed round; 
many of them in the old Carpaccio rig-outs, very 
gorgeous though a little tawdry when taken out 
of the canvas. But the rush and the collisions, 
and the sound of many waters walloping under the 
bellies of the gondolas, and the blows of fighting 
oars — regular underwater wrestling matches — 
made it as vivid and amusing as a prolonged Ox- 
ford and Cambridge boat-race in fancy costume. 
Our gondoliers streamed with the exertion, and 
looked like men fighting a real battle, and yet 
enjoyed it thoroughly. Violent altercations with 
■police-boats don’t ruffle them at all; at one mo- 
ment it looks daggers drawn; at the next it is 
shrugs and smiles. Often, from not knowing 
enough of Italian and Italian ways, I get hot all 
over when an ordinary discussion is going on, 
thinking that blows are about to be exchanged. 
The Mother-Aunt had hung a wonderful satin 
skirt out of window for decoration; and when she 
leaned over it in a bodice of the same color, it 
looked as if she were sitting with her legs out as 


132 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


well ! I suppose it was this peculiar effect that, 
when the King and Queen came by earlier in the 
morning, won for her a special bow and smile. 

I must hurry or I shall miss the post that 1 
wish to catch. There seems little chance now of 
my getting you in Venice; but elsewhere perhaps 
you will drop to me out of the clouds. 

Your own and most loving. 




LOVE-LETTERS. 


133 




LETTER XXXIX. 


My own, own Beloved, — Say that my being 
away does not seem too long? I have not had a 
letter yet, and that makes me somehow not anxious 
hut compunctious; only w r riting to you of all I 
do helps to keep me in good conscience. Xot the 
other foot gone to the mender’s, I hope, with the 
same obstructive accompaniments as w r ent to the 
setting-up again of the last ? If I don’t hear soon, 
you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as 
much by the word as a gondola by the hour. 

Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best 
in San Giorgio di Schiavone: two are St. George 
pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some other 
saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is 
really a homily on the love and pathos of animals. 
First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort of un- 
dipped white poodle in the pictorial place of 
honor, all alone on a floor beautifully swept and 
garnished, looking up wistfully to his master busy 
at writing (a Benjy saying, “ Come and take me 
for a walk, there’s a good saint!”). Scattered 
among the adornments of the room are small 
bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, 


134 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


these being his tastes, when St. Jerome goes into 
the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and accom- 
panies him when he pays a call oik the monks in a 
neighboring monastery. Thereupon, holy men of 
little faith, the entire fraternity take to their heels 
and rush up-stairs, the hindermost clinging to the 
skirts of the formermost to be hauled the quicker 
out of harm’s way. And all the while the lion 
stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and 
Jerome with shrugs tries to explain that even the 
best butter wouldn’t melt in his dear lion’s 
mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome 
lies dying in excessive odor of sanctity, and all 
the monks crowd, round him with prayers and 
viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a 
“ happy death,” while Jerome wonders feebly what 
it is he misses in all this to-do for which he cares 
so little. And there, elbowed far out into the 
cold, the lion lies and lifts his poor head and 
howls because lie knows his master is being taken 
from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, 
a queer, nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs 
out the length of its tether to comfort the discon- 
solate beast: but la bete humaine has got the 
whip-hand of the situation. In another picture 
is a parrot that has just mimicked a dog, or called 
“ Carlo ! ” and then laughed : the dog turns his 
head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, ex- 
actly as a sensitive dog does when you make fun 
of him. 

These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pic* 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


135 


tnres which are quite glorious in color and design, 
but they help me to love Carpaccio to distraction ; 
and when the others lose me, they hunt through 
all the Carpaccios in Venice till they find me! 

Love me a little more if possible while I am so 
long absent from you ! What I do and what I 
think go so much together now, that you will take 
what I write as the most of me that it is possible 
to cram in, coming back to you to share every- 
thing. 

Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I 
would like to see your face ! Here, dearest, 
among these palaces you would be in your peerage, 
for I think you have some southern blood in you. 

Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody 
said to me to-day, “ But you are not quite Eng- 
lish, are you ? 99 And I swore by the nine gods of 
my ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look 
is in us: my father had a foreign air, but made 
up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle 
H. used to call him “ J ohn Bull let loose.” 

My. love to England. Is it showing much aut- 
umn yet? My eyes long for green fields again. 
Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one 
until the other day from the top of St. Giorgio 
Maggiore, where one lies in hiding under the mon- 
astery walls. 

All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts 
of you. Yet do not expect me to come back wiser: 
my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with 
you ? and there I stopped for good and alb There 


136 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


I am still, everything included: what do you 
want more ? My letter and my heart both threat- 
en to be over-weight, so no more of them this 
time. Most dearly do I love you. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


137 


LETTER XL. 

Beloved, — If two days slip by, I don’t know 
where I am when I come to write; things get so 
crowded in such a short space of time. Where I 
left off I know not : I will begin where I am most 
awake — your letter which I have just received. 

That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a 
truce till February ! And since the struggle then 
must needs be a sharp one — with only one end, 
as we know, — do not vex her now by any overt 
signs of preparation as if you assumed already 
that her final arguments were to be as so much 
chaff before the wind. You do not tell me what 
she argues, and I do not ask. She does not say I 
shall not love you enough ! 

To answer businesslike to your questions first: 
with your forgiveness- we stay here till the 25th, 
and get back to England with the last of the 
month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? 
Others have the wish to stay even longer, and it 
would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a cer- 
tain degree of reasonableness with my particular 
reason for impatience, seeing, moreover, that in 
your love I have every help for remaining patient. 
It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the 


138 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


“ truce ” sets you free now, and that you could 
meet us here after all, and prolong our stay in- 
definitely? I know one besides myself who would 
be glad and would welcome an outside excuse 
dearly. 

For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things ! 
Arthur’s heart is laid up with a small love affair, 
and it is the comiealest of internal maladies. He 
is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and 
I write in haste before my mouth is sealed by his 
confidences. I fancy I know the party, an ener- 
getic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where 
Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. 
She talked vaguely of being in Venice some time 
this autumn; and the vagueness continues! Ar- 
thur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately 
with no interest but in hotel books.' And for fear 
lost we should gird up his loins and drag him 
away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is 
forever praising Venice as a resting-place, and 
saying he wants to be nowhere else. The bathing 
justs keeps him alive; but when put to it to ex- 
plain what charms him since pictures do not, and 
architecture only slightly, he says in exemplary 
brotherly fashion that he likes to see me complet- 
ing my education and enthusiasms,— and does not 
realize with how foreign an air that explanation 
sits upon his shoulders. 

I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, 
and for your sake transferred a kiss to it, Italian 
fashion^ with my thumb and the sign of the gross, 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


139 


I hope it will do yon good. Also, I have been np 
among the galleries of St. Mark’s and about the 
roof and the vest front where somebody or another 
painted his picture of the bronze horses. 

The pigeons get to recognize people personally, 
and grow more intimate every time we come. I 
even conceive they make favorites, for I had three 
pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing 
to take it in any other fashion, and they coo and 
say thank you before and after every seed they 
take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of 
all the Italian beggars— and the cleanest. 

Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I 
think less for the sake of giving us tea than that 
we should see his palace, or rather his first floor, 
in which alone lie seems to lose himself. I have 
no idea for measurements, but I imagine his big 
sala is about eighty feet long and perhaps twenty- 
five feet across,, with a flat-beamed roof, windows 
at each end, and portieres along the walls of old 
blue Venetian linen: a place in which it seems 
one could only live and think nobly. His face 
seems to respond to its teachings. What more 
might not an environment like that bring out in 
you ? Come and let me see ! I have hopes spring- 
ing as I think of things that you may be coming 
after all; and that that is what lay concealed 
under the gaiety of your last paragraph. Then I 
am more blessed even than I knew. What, you 
are coming ? So well I do love you, my Beloved ! 


140 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER XLI. 

Dearest, — This letter will travel with me: we 
leave to-day. Our movements are to be too rest- 
less and uncomfortable for the next few days for 
me to have a chance of quiet seeing or qui&t writ- 
ing anywhere. At Riva we shall rest, I hope. 

Yesterday a storm began coming over towards 
evening, and I thought to myself that if it passed 
in time there should be a splendid sunset of 
smolder and glitter to be seen from the Cam- 
panile, and perhaps by good chance a rainbow. 

I went alone: when I got to the top the rain 
was pelting hard; so there I stayed happily 
weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice 
“ silvered with slants of rain/’ and watching 
umbrellas scuttering below with toes beneath them. 
The golden smolder was very slow in coming: 
it lay over the mainland and came creeping along 
the railway track. Then came the glitter and the 
sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow. 
But it wasn’t a bow, it was a circle: the Cam- 
panile stood up as it were a spoke in the middle, 
— the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the 
ground of Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


141 


the Campanile. It was worth waiting an hour to 
see. The islands shone mellow and bright in the 
clearance with the storm going off black behind 
them. Good-by, Venice! 


Verona began by seeming dull to me; but it 
improves and unfolds beautiful corners of itself 
to be looked at: only I am given so little time. 
The Tombs of the Della Scalas and the Renais- 
sance facades of the Consiglio are what chiefly de- 
light me. I had some quiet hours in the Museo, 
where I fell in love with a little picture by an un- 
known painter, of Orpheus charming the beasts 
in a wandering green landscape, with a dance of 
fauns in the distance, and here and there Eury- 
dice running; — and Orpheus in Hades, and the 
Thracian women killing him, and a crocodile 
fishing out his head, and mermaids and ducks 
sitting above their reflections reflecting. 

Also there is one beautiful Tobias and the 
Angel there by a painter whose name I most un- 
gratefully forget. I saw a man yesterday carrying 
fishes in the market, each strung through the 
gills on a twig of myrtle: that is how Tobias 
ought to carry his fish: when a native custom 
suggests old paintings, how charming it always 



We have just got here from Verona. In the 


142 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


matter of the garden at least it is a Paradise of 
a place. A great sill of honeysuckle leans out 
from my window : beyond is a court grown round 
with creepers, and beyond that the garden — such 
a garden ! The first thing one sees is an arcade of 
vines upon stone pillars, between which peep 
stacks of roses, going off a little from their glory 
now, and right away stretches an alley of green, 
that shows at the end, a furlong off, the blue glit- 
ter of water. It is a beautifully wild garden: 
grass and vegetables and trees and roses all grow 
in a jungle together. There are little groves of 
bamboo and chestnut and willow; and a runnel 
of water is somewhere — I can hear it. It suggests 
rest, which I want; and so, for all its difference, 
suggests you, whom also I want, — more, I own it 
now, than I have said ! But that went without 
saying, Beloved, as it always must if it is to be 
the truth and nothing short of the truth. 

While this has been waiting to go, your letter 
has been put into my hands. I am too happy to 
say words about it, and can afford now to let this 
go as it is. The little time of waiting for you will 
be perfect happiness now; and your coming seems 
to color all that is behind as well. I have had a 
good time indeed, and was only wearying with the 
plethora of my enjojmrent: but the better time 
has been kept till now. We shall be together day 
after day and all day long for at least a month, I 
hope: a joy that has never happened to us yet. 

Never mind about the lost letter now, dearest., 


LOVE-LETTERS. 143 

dearest: Venice was a little empty just one week 
because of it. I still hope it will come; but what 
matter ? — I know you will. All my heart waits 
for you. — Your most glad and most loving. 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


1 U 


LETTER XLII. 

Dearest, — I saw an old woman riding a horse 
astride: and I was convinced on the spot that 
this is the Tightest way of riding, and that the 
side-saddle was a foolish and affected invention. 
The horse was fine, and so was the young man 
leading it: the old woman was upright and state- 
ly, with a wide hat and full petticoats like a Maxi- 
milian soldier. 

This was at Bozen, where we stayed for two 
nights, and from which I have brought a cold 
with me: it seems such an English thing to have, 
that I feel quite at home in the discomfort of it. 
It had been such wonderful weather that we were 
sitting out of doors every evening up to 9.30 p. m. 
without wraps, and on our heads only our “ wid- 
ows’ caps.” (The M. A. persists in a style which 
suggests that Uncle N. has gone to a better world. ) 
Mine was too flimsy a work of fiction, and a day 
before I had been for a climb and got wet through, 
so a chill laid its benediction on my head, and 
here I am, — not seriously incommoded by the 
malady, but by the remedy, which is the M. A. 
full of kind quackings and fierce tyranny if I do 


JiOVE-LETTERS. 


145 


but put my head out of window to admire the 
view, whose best is a little round the corner. 

I had no idea Innsbruck was so high up among 
the mountains : snows are on the peaks all round. 
Behind the house-tops, so close and near, lies , a 
quarter circle of white crests. You are told that 
in winter creature.:; come down and look in at the 
windows: sometimes they are called wolves, some- 
times bears — any way the feeling is medieval. 

Hereabouts the wayside shrines nearly always 
contain a crucifix, whereas in Italy that was 
rare — the Virgin and Child being the most 
common. I remarked on this, which I suppose 
gave rise to a subsequent observation of the 
M. A/s: “I think the Tyrolese are a good people: 
they are not given over to Mariolatry like those 
poor priest-ridden Italians.” I think, however, 
that they merely have that fundamental grace, 
religious simplicity, worshiping — just what they 
can get, for yesterday I saw two dear old bodies 
going round and telling their beads before the 
bronze statues of the Maximilian tomb — King 
Arthur, Charles the Bold, etc. I suppose, by 
mere association, a statue helps them to pray. 

The national costume does look so nice, though 
not exactly beautiful. I like the flat, black hats 
with long streamers behind and a gold tassel, and 
the spacious apron. Blue satin is a favorite style, 
always silk or satin for Sunday best: one I saw 
of pearl-white brocade. 

Since we came north we have had lovely 

10 


146 AN ENGLISHWOMANS 

weather, except the one day of which I am still 
the filterings: and morning along the Brenner 
Pass was perfect. I think the mountains look 
most beautiful quite early, at sunrise, when they 
are all pearly and mysterious. 

We go on to Zurich on Thursday, and then, 
Beloved, and then ! — so this must be my last let- 
ter, since I shall have nowhere to write to with 
you rushing all across Europe and resting no- 
where because of my impatience to have you. 
The Mother-Aunt concedes a whole month, but 
Arthur will have to leave earlier for the begin- 
ning of term. How little my two dearest men 
have yet seen of each other ! Barely a week lies 
between us: this will scarcely catch you. Dear- 
est of dearests, my heart waits on yours. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


147 


LETTER XLIII. 

My Dearest, — See what an effect your ee gallons 
young hound ” episode has had on me. I send it 
back to you roughly done into rhyme. I don’t 
know whether it will carry ; for, outside your tell- 
ing of it, “ Johnnie Ivigarrow ” is not a name of 
heroic sound. What touches me as so strangely 
complete about it is that you should have got that 
impression and momentary romantic delusion as 
a child, and now hear, years after, of his disap- 
pearing out of life thus fittingly and mysteriously, 
so that his name will fix its legend to the country- 
side for many a long day. I would like to go 
there some day with you, and standing on Twloch 
Hill imagine all the country round as the burial- 
place of the strong man on whose knees my be- 
loved used to play when a child. 

It must have been soon after this that your 
brother died: truly, dearest, from now, and 
strangely, this Johnnie Kigarrow will seem more 
to me than him: touching a more heroic strain of 
idea, and stiffening fibers in your nature that 
brotherhood, as a rule, has no bearing on. 

A short letter to-day, Beloved, because what 
goes with it is so long. This is the first time I 


148 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


have come before your eyes as anything but a 
letter-writer, and I am doubtful whether you will 
care to have so much all about yourself. Yet for 
that very reason think how much I loved doing it ! 
I am jealous of those days before I knew you, and 
want to have all their wild-honey flavor for my- 
self. Do remember more, and tell me ! Dearest 
heart, it was to me you were coming through all 
your scampers and ramblings; no wonder, with 
that unknown good running parallel, that my 
childhood was a happy one. May long life bless 
you, Beloved! 


( Enclosure .) 

My brother and I were down in Wales, 

And listened by night to the Welshman’s tales ; 
He was eleven and I was ten. 

We s^t on the knees of the farmer’s men 
After the whole day’s work was done : 

And I was friends with the farmer’s son. 

His hands were rough as his arms were strong, 
His mouth was merry and loud for song : 

Each night when set by the ingle-wall 
He was the merriest man of them all. 

I would catch at his beard and say 
All the things I had done in the day — 

Tumbled boulders over the force, 

Swum in the river and fired the gorse — 

“ Half the side of the hill ! ” quoth I : — 

“ Ah ! ” cried he, “ and didn’t jmu die? ” 

“ Chut ! ” said he, “ but the squeak was narrow ! 
Didn’t you meet with Johnnie Kigarrow ? ” 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


149 


“ No ! ” said I, “ and who will he be ? 

And what will be Johnnie Kigarrow to me?” 

The farmer’s son said under his breath, 

“ Johnnie Kigarrow may be your death ! 

Listen you here, and keep you still — 

Johnnie Kigarrow bides under the hill ; 

Twloch barrow stands over his head ; 

He shallows the river to make his bed : 

Boulders roll when he stirs a limb ; 

And the gorse on the hill belongs to him ! 

And if so be one fires his gorse, 

He’s out of his bed, and he mounts his horse. 

Off he sets : with first long stride 
He is halfway over the mountain side ; 

With his second stride he has crossed the barrow, 
And he has you fast, has Johnnie Kigarrow ! ” 

Half 1 laughed and half I feared ; 

I clutched and tugged at the strong man’s beard 
And bragged as brave as a boy could be — 

“ So ? but, you see, he didn’t catch me ! r 

Fear caught hold of me ; what had I done? 

High as the roof rose the farmer’s son : 

How the sight of him froze my marrow ! 

“I,” he cried, “ am Johnnie Kigarrow ! ” 

Well, you wonder, what was the end ? 

Never forget ; — he had called me “ friend ” ! 
Mighty of limb, and hard, and brown ; 

Quickly he laughed and set me down. 

“ Heh ! ” said he ; “ but the squeak was narrow, 
Not to be caught by Johnnie Kigarrow ! ” 

Now, I hear, after years gone by, 

Nobody knows how he came to die. 




150 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

He strode out one night of storm : 

“ Get you to bed, and keep you warm I ” 
Out into darkness so went he : 

Nobody knows where his bones may be. 

Only I think — if his tongue let go 
Truth that once, — liow perhaps / know. 
Twlocli river, and Twlocli barrow, 

Do you cover my Johnnie Kigarrow ? 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


151 


LETTER XLIV. 

Dearest, — I have been doing something so wise 
and foolish: mentally wise, 1 mean, and physic- 
ally foolish. Do you guess? — Disobeying your 
parting injunction, and sitting up to see eclipses. 

It was such a luxury to do as I was not told just 
for once ; to feel there was an independent me 
still capable of asserting itself. My belief is that, 
waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your 
godhead has put on its spiritual nightcap, and 
begun nodding, your mesmeric influence relaxes. 
Up starts resolution and independence, and I 
breathe desolately for a time, feeling myself once 
more a free woman. 

J T\^as a tremulous experience. Beloved, but I 
loved it all the more for that. How we love play- 
ing at grief and death — the two things that must 
come — before it is their due time ! I took a look 
at my world for three most mortal hours last 
night, trying to see you out of it. And oh, how 
close it kept bringing me ! I almost heard you 
breathe, and was forever wondering — Can we 
ever be nearer, or love each other more than we 
do? For that we should each want a sixth sense, 
and a second soul; and it wguld still be only the 


152 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


same spread out over larger territory. I prefer 
to keep it nestling close in its present limitations, 
where it feels like a “ growing pain": children 
have it in their legs, we in our hearts. 

I am growing sleepy as I write, and feel I am 
sending you a dull letter, — my penalty for doing 
as you forbade. 

I sat up from half-past one to a quarter to five 
to see our shadow go over heaven. I didn't see 
much, the sky was too piebald : but I was not dis- 
appointed, as I had never watched the darkness 
into dawn like that before: and it was interest- 
ing to hear all the persons awaking: — cocks at 
half-past four, frogs immediately after, then 
pheasants and various others following. I was 
cuddled close up against my window, throned in 
a big arm-chair with many pillows, a spirit-lamp, 
cocoa, bread-and-butter, and buns; so I fared 
well. Just after the pheasants and the first queru- 
lous fidgetings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft 
pattering along the path below: and Benjy, se- 
cretive and important, is fussing his way" to the 
shrubbery y when instinct or real sentiment prompts 
him to look up at my window; he gives a whimper 
and a wag and goes on. I try to persuade myself 
that he didn’t see me, and that he does this, other 
mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered 
up in rebellion, and peering through blinds at 
wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in 
the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your- 
back attachment of that sort? — that every morn- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


153 


ing he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and 
wags, and goes by? 

I heard him very happy in the shrubs a moment 
after: he and a pheasant, I fancy, disputing over 
a question of boundaries. And he comes in for 
breakfast, three hours later, looking positively 
fresh , and wants to know why I am yawning. 

Most mornings he brings your letter up to my 
room in his mouth. It is old Nan-nan’s joke: 
she only sends up yours so, and pretends it is 
Benjy’s own clever selection. I pretend that, too, 
to him; and he thinks he is doing something 
wonderful. The other morning I was — well, 
Benjy hears splashing: and tires of waiting — or 
his mouth waters. An extra can of hot water 
happens to stand at the door; and therein he de- 
posits his treasure (mine, I mean), and retires, 
saying nothing. The consequence is, when I open 
three minutes after his scratch, I find you all un- 
gummed and swimming, your beautiful hand- 
writing bleared and smeared, so that no eye but 
mine could have read it. Benjy’s shame when I 
showed him what he had done was wonderful. 

How it rejoices me to write quite foolish things 
to you ! — that I can helps to explain a great deal 
in the up-above order of things, which I never 
took in when I was merely young and frivolous. 
One must have touched a grave side of life before 
one can take in that Heaven is not opposed to 
laughter. 

My eye has just caught back at what I have 




154 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

written ; and the “ little death ” runs through 
me, just because I wrote “ grave side.” It 
shouldn’t, but loving has made me superstitious: 
the happiness seems too great; how can it go on? 
I keep thinking — this is not life: you are too 
much for me, my dearest ! 

Oh, my Beloved, come, quickly to meet me to- 
day : this morning ! Ride over ; I am willing it. 
My own dearest, you must come. If you don’t, 
what shall I believe? That Love cannot outdo 
space: that? when you are away I cannot reach 
you by willing. But I can: come to me! You 
shall see my arms open to you as never before. 
What is it? — you must be coming. I have more 
love in me after all than I knew. 

Ah, I know: I wrote “ grave side,” and all my 
heart is in arms against the treason. With us 
it is not “ till death us do part ” ; we leap it alto- 
gether, and are clasped on the other side. 

My dear, my dear, I lay my head down on your 
heart : I love you ! I post this to show how cer- 
tain I am. At 12 to-day I shall see you. 




LOVE-LETTERS. 


155 


LETTER XLY. 

Beloved, — I look at this ridiculous little nib 
now, running like a plow along the furrows ! 
What can the poor thing do ? Bury its poor 
black, blunt little nose in the English language 
in order to tell you, in all sorts of roundabout 
ways, what you know already as well as I do. 
And yet, though that is all it can do, you com- 
plain of not having had a letter ! Not had a let- 
ter? Beloved, there are half a hundred I have 
not had from you ! Do -you suppose you have ever, 
any. one week in your life, sent me as many as I 
wanted ? 

Now, for once, I did hold off and didn’t write 
to you: because there was something in your last 
I couldn’t give any answer to, and I hoped you 
would come yourself before I need. Then I hoped 
silence would bring you : and now — no ! — instead 
of your dear peace-giving face I get this com- 
plaint ! 

Ah, Beloved, have you in reality any complaint, 
or sorrow that I can set at rest? Or has that 
little, little silence made you anxious ? I do come 
to think so, for you never flourish your words 
about as I do: so, believing that, I would like to 


156 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


write again differently; only it is truer to let 
what I have written stand, and make amends for 
it in all haste. I love yon so infinitely well, how 
could even a year’s silence give you any doubt 
or anxiety, so long as you knew I was not ill? 

“ Should one not make great concessions to 
great grief even when it . is unreasonable ? ” I 
cannot answer, dearest: I am in the dark. Great 
grief cannot be great without reasons: it should 
give them, and you should judge by them: — you, 
not I. I imagine you have again been face to 
face with fierce, unexplained opposition. Dear- 
est, if it would give you happiness, I would say, 
make five, ten, twenty years’ “ concession,” as you 
call it. But the only time you ever spoke to me 
clearly about your mother’s mind towards me, 
you said she wanted an absolute surrender from 
you, not covered only by her lifetime. Then 
though I pitied her, I had to smile. A twenty 
years’ concession even would not give rest to her 
perturbed spirit. I pray truly — having so much 
reason for your sake to pray it — “ God rest her 
soul ! and give her a saner mind towards both of 
us.” 

Why has this come about at all ? It is not Feb- 
ruary yet: and our plans have been putting forth 
no buds before their time. When the day comes, 
and you have said the inevitable word, I think 
more calm will follow than you expect. You . 
dearest, I do understand: and the instinct of 
tenderness you have towards a claim which yet 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


157 


fills you with the sense of its injustice. I know 
that you can laugh at her threat to make you 
poor; hut not at hurting her affections. Did 
your asking for an “ answer 99 mean that I was to 
write so openly? Bless you, my own dearest. 


158 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 




LETTER XLVI. 

Dearest, — To-day I came upon a strange spec- 
tacle: poor old Nan-nan weeping for wounded 
pride in me. I found her stitching at raiment of 
needlework that is to be mine (piles of it have 
been through her fingers since the word first went 
out; for her love asserts that I am to go all home- 
made from my old home to my new one — wher- 
ever that may he!). And she was weeping be- 
cause, as I slowly got to understand, from one par- 
ticular quarter too little attention had been paid 
to me: — the kow-tow of a ceremonious reception 
into my new status had not been deep enough to 
make amends to her heart for its partial loss of 
me. 

Her deferential recognition of the change which 
is coming is pathetic and full of etiquette; it is 
a+ once so jealous and so unselfish. Because her 
sense of the proprieties will not allow her to do 
so much longer, she comes up to my room and 
makes opportunity to scold me over quite slight 
things: — and there I am, meeker under her than 
I would he to any relative. So to-day I had 
to hear a statement of your mother’s infirmities 
rigorously outlined in a way I could only pretend 


LOVfi-LETTESS. 150 

to be deaf to until she bad done. Then I said, 
“ Xan-nan, go and say your prayers!” And as 
she stuck her heels down and refused to go, there 
I left the poor thing, not to prayer, I fear, but to 
desolate weeping, in which love and pride will 
get more firmly entangled together than ever. 

I know when I go up to my room next I shall 
find fresh flowers put upon my table: but the 
grievous old dear will be carrying a sore heart 
that I cannot comfort by any words. I cannot 
convince her that I am not hiding in myself any 
wounds such as she feels on my behalf. 

I write this, dearest, as an indirect answer to 
yours, — which is but ISTan-nan’s wo writ large. 
If I could persuade your two dear and very differ- 
ent heads how very slightly wounded I am by a 
thing which a little waiting will bring right, I 
could give it even less thought than I do. Are 
you, keeping the truce in spirit when you disturb 
yourself like this? Trust me, Beloved, always to 
be candid: I will complain to you when I feel 
in need of comfort. Be comforted yourself, mean- 
while, and don’t shape ghosts of grief which never 
do a goose-step over me ! Ah, well, well, if there 
is a way to love you better than I do now, only 
show it me ! Meantime, think of me as your mosc 
contented and happy-go-loving. 


1G0 


AX ENGLISHWOMANS 


LETTER XLVII. 

Dearest, — I am haunted by a line of quotation, 
and cannot think where it comes from: — 

“ Now sets the year in roaring gray.” 

Can you help me to what follows? If it is a true 
poem it ought now to be able to sing itself to me 
at large from an outer world which at this mo- 
ment is all gray and roaring. To-day the year is 
bowing itself out tempestuously, as if angry at 
having to go. Dear golden year! I am sorry to 
see its face so changed and withering: it has held 
so much for us both. Yet I am feeling vigorous 
and quite like spring. All the seasons have their 
marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this 
is an autumn march-wind; before long I shall be 
out of it, and up the hill to look over at your 
territory and you being swept and garnished for 
the seven devils of winter. 

“ Roaring gray” suggests Tennyson, whom I 
do very much associate with this sort of weather, 
not so much because of passages in Maud and In 
Memoriam as because I once went over to Swains- 
ton, on a day such as this when rooks and leaves 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


161 


alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard there 
the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his 
friend’s funeral, would not go into the house, 
hut asked for one of Sir John’s old hats, and with 
that on his head sat in the garden and wrote al- 
most the best of his small lyrics: — 

“ Nightingales warble without, 

Within was weeping for thee.” 

The “ old hat ” was mentioned as something hu- 
morous: yet an old glove is the most accepted 
symbol of faithful absence: and why should head 
rank lower than hand? What creatures of con- 
vention we are ! 

There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, 
that a nightcap carries in it the dreams of its first 
owner, or that anything laid over a sleeper’s head 
will bring away the dream. One of the stories 
which used to put a lump in my throat as a child 
was of an old backwoodsman who by that means 
found out that his dog stole hams from the store- 
room. The dog was given away in disgrace, and 
came to England to die of a broken heart at the 
sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpack- 
ing, seemed like a monstrous day of judgment — 
the bones of his misdeeds rising again reclothed 
with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had 
never forgotten. 

I wonder how long it was before I left off def- 
initely choosing out a story for the pleasure of 

11 


162 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 

making myself cry ! When one begins to avoid 
that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first 
leaf of youth is flown. 

To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of 
the best year I have ever lived through, and am 
your very middle-aged faithful and true. 


LOVE-LETTERS, 


163 


LETTER XLVIII. 

Dearest, — If anybody has been “ calling me 
names ” that are not mine, they do me a fine in- 
jury, and you did well to purge the text of their 
abuse. I agree with no authority, however im- 
mortal, which inquires “ What’s in a name ? ” ex- 
pecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers. 
I answer with a snap of temper that the blood, 
boots, and bones of my ancestors are in mine ! 
Do you suppose I could have been the same woman 
had such names as Amelia or Bella or Cinderella 
been clinging leechlike to my consciousness 
through all the years of my training? Why, 
there are names I can think of which would have 
made me break down into side-ringlets had I 
been forced to wear them audibly. 

The effect is not so absolute when it is a second 
name that can be tucked away if unpresentable, 

but even then it is a misfortune. There is C , 

now, who won’t marry, I believe, chiefly because 
of the insane “ Annie” with which she was smit- 
ten at the baptismal font by an afterthought. 
She regards it as a taint in her constitution which 
orders her to a lonely life lest worse might follow. 


164 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


And apply the consideration more publicly : do you 
imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort 
of king if, when he comes to the throne, he calls 
himself King Albert Edward in florid Continen- 
tal fashion, instead of “Edward the Seventh,” 
with a right hope that an Edward the Eighth may 
follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck race of 
it with the Henries? I don’t know anything 
that would do more to knit up the English consti- 
tution: but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial 
I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing 
to be done. 

Now of all this I had an instance in the village 
the day before yesterday. At the corner house 
by the post-office, as I went by , a bird opened his 
bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down 
he went over a golden scale: pitched afresh, and 
dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over 
the range of both. Then he flung back his shabby 
head and laughed. “ In all my father’s realm 
there are no such bells as these ! ” It was the 
laughing jackass. “Who gave you your name?” 
“ My godfathers and my godmothers in nry bap- 
tism.” Well, his will have that to answer for, how- 
ever safely for the rest he may have eschewed the 
world, the flesh, and the devil. Poor bird, to be set 
to sing to us under such a burden: — of which, 
unconscious failure, he knows nothing. 

Here I have remembered for you a bit of a 
poem that took hold of me some while ago and 
touched on the same unkindness: only here the 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


165 


flower is conscious of the wrong done to it, and 
looks forward to a day of juster judgment: — 


“ What have I done ? — Man came 

(There’s nothing that sticks like dirt), 

Looked at me with eyes of blame, 

And called me ‘ Squinancy-wort I * 

What have I done ? I linger 
(I cannot say that I live) 

In the happy lands of my birth ; 

Passers-by point with the finger : 

For me the light of the sun 
Is darkened. Oh, what would I give 
To creep away, and hide my shame in the earth ! 
What have done ? 

Yet there is hope. I have seen 
Many changes since I began. 

The web-footed beasts have been 
(Dear beasts!) — and gone, being part of some wider 
plan. 

Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this 
man ! ” 

Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments: 
here is another instance, where evidently in life 
I did not love well enough a character nobler 
than this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, 
who toadies to all my moods. Calling at the lower 
farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname 
“ Manger,” because his dog- jaws always refused 
tc smile on me. His old mistress gave me a pa- 
thetic account of his last da}'s. It was the muz- 
zling order that broke his poor old heart. He took 


166 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


it as an accusation on a point where, though of a 
melancholy disposition, his reputation had been 
spotless. He never lifted his head nor smiled 
again. And not all his mistress’s love could ex- 
plain to him that he was not in fault. She wept 
as she told it me. 

Good-by, dearest, and for this letter so full of 
such little worth call me what names you like; 
and I will go to Jemima, Iveziah, and Keren- 
happuch for the patience in which they must 
have taken after their father when he so named 
them, I suppose for a discipline. 

My Beloved, let my heart come where it wants 
to be. Twilight has been on me to-day, I don’t 
know why ; and I have not wrtten it off as I hoped 
to do. — All, yours and nothing left. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


167 


LETTER XLIX. 

Dearest, — I suppose your mother’s continued ab- 
sence, and her unexplanation of her further stay, 
must be taken for unyielding disapproval, and 
tells us what to expect of February. It is not a 
cordial form of “ truce ” : but since it lets me 
see just twice as much of you as I should other- 
wise, I will not complain so long as it does not 
make you unhappy. You write to her often and 
kindly, do you not? 

Well, if this last letter of hers frees you suf- 
ficiently, it u quite settled at this end that you are 
to be with us for Christmas: — read into that the 
warmest corners of a heart already fully occupied. 
I do not think of it too much, till I am assured 
it is to be. 

Did you go over to Pembury for the day? Your 
letter does not say anything: but your letters 
have a wonderful way with them of leaving out 
things of outside importance. I shall hear from 
the rattle of returning fire-engines some day that 


(C 


168 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

Hatterling has been burned down: and you will 
arrive cool the next day and say, “ Oh yes, it 
is so ! ” 

I am sure you have been right to secure this 
pledge of independence to yourself: but it hurts 
me to think what a deadly offense it may be both 
to her tenderness for you and her pride and stern 
love of power. To realize suddenly that Hatter- 
ling does not mean to you so much as the power 
to be your own master and happy in your own 
way, which is altogether opposite to her way, will 
be so much of a blow that at first you will be able 
to do nothing to soften it. 

February fill-dyke is t likely to be true to its 
name, this coming one, in all that concerns us 
and our fortunes. Meanwhile, if at Pembury 
you brought things any nearer settlement, and 
are not coming so soon as to-morrow, let me know : 
for some things of “ outside importance ” do af- 
fect me unfavorably while in suspense. I have 
not your serene determination to abide the work- 
ings of Kismet when once all that can be done is 
done. 

The sun sets now, when it does so visibly, just 
where Pembury is. I take it as an omen. In 
your diary to-morrow you may write down in the 
business column that you have had a business let- 
ter from me, or as near to one as I can go: — 
chiefly for that it requires an answer on this mat- 
ter of “ outside importance,” which otherwise you 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


169 


will altogether leave out. But you will do better 
still to come. My whole heart goes out to fetch 
you: my dearest dear, ever your own. 


170 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER L. 

Beloved, — No, not Browning but Tennyson was 
in my thoughts at our last ride together: and I 
found myself shy, as I have been for a long time 
wishing to say things I could not. What has 
never entered your head to ask becomes difficult 
when I wish to get it spoken. So I bring Tenny- 
son to tell you what I mean : — 

“ Dosn‘t thou ’ear my ’erse’s legs, as they canters 
awaay ? 

Proputty, proputty, proputty — that’s what I ’ears 
em saay ! ” 

The tune of this kept me silent all the while we 
galloped: this and Pembury, a name that glows 
to me now like the New Jerusalem. 

And do you understand, Belcved? or must I 
say more? My freedom has made its nest under 
my uncle’s Voof: but I am a quite independent 
person in other ways besides character. 

Well, Pembury was settled on }mir own initi- 
ative: and I looked on proud*and glad. Now I 
have my own little word to add, merely a tail that 
wags and makes merry over a thing decided and 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


m 


done. Do you forgive me for this: and for the 
greater offense of being quite shy at having to 
write it? 

My Aunt thanks you for the game: for my 
part I cannot own that it will taste sweeter to 
me for being your own shooting. And please, 
whatever else you do big and grand and danger- 
ous, respect my superstitions and don't shoot any 
laiks this winter. In the spring I would like to 
think that here or there an extra lark bubbles over 
because I and my whims find occasional favor in 
your sight. When I ask great favors you always 
grant them; and so, Ahasuerus, grant this little 
one to your beautifully loving. 

Give me the credit of being conscious of it, Be- 
loved: postscripts I never do write. I am glad 
you noticed it. If I find anything left out I start 
another letter: this is that other letter: it goes 
into the same envelope merely for company, and 
signs itself yours in all state. 


172 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LI. 

Dearest, — It was so nice and comedy to see the 
Mother-Aunt this morning importantly opening 
a letter from you all to herself with the pleasure 
quite unmixed by any enclosure for me, or any 
other letter in the house to me so far as she was 
aware. I listened to you with new ears, discover- 
ing that you write quite beautifully in the style 
which I never get from you. Don’t, because I 
admire you in your more formal form, alter in 
your style to me. I prefer you much, for my own 
part, formless: and feel nearer to your heart in 
an unfinished sentence than in one that is per- 
fectly balanced. Still I want you to know that 
your cordial warmed her dear old heart and makes 
her not think now that she has let me see too much 
of you. She was just beginning to worry herself 
jealously into that belief the last two days: and 
Arthur’s taking to you helped to the same end. 
Very well; I seem to understand everybody’s od- 
dities now, — having made a complete study of 
yours. 

Best Beloved, I have your little letter lying 
close, and feel dumb when I try to answer. You 
with your few words make me feel a small thing 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


173 


with all my unpenned rabble about me. Only 
you do know so very well that I love you better 
than I can ever write. This is my first letter of 
the new year: will our letter-writing go on all 
this year, or will it, as we dearly dream, die a 
divine death somewhere before autumn? 

In any case, I am, dearest, your most happy 
and loving. 


174 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTEE LII. 

My dearest, — Arthur and the friend went off 
together yesterday. I am glad the latter stayed 
just long enough after you left for me to have 
leisure to find him out human. Here is the whole 
story: he came and unbosomed to me three days 
ago: and he said nothing about not telling, so I 
tell you. As water goes from a duck’s back, so 
go all things worth hearng from me to you. 

Arthur had said to him, “ Come down for a 
week,” and he had answered, “ Can’t, because of 
clothes ! ” explaining that beyond evening-dress 
he had only those he stood in. “ Well,” said 
Arthur, “ stand in them, then ; you look all 
right.” “ The question is,” said his friend, “ can 
I sit down ? ” However, he came ; and was ap- 
palled to find that a man unpacked his trunk, 
and would in all probability be carrying away' his 
clothes each night to brush them. He, conscious 
of interiors, a lining hanging in rags, and even 
a patching somewhere, had not the heart to let 
his one and only day- jacket go down to the ser- 
vants’ hall to be sniffed over: and so every even- 
ing when he dressed for dinner he hid his jacket 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


175 


laboriously under the permanent layers of a linen 
wardrobe which stood in his room. 

I had all this in the frankest manner from him 
in the hour when he became human:* and my 
fancy tired at the vision. Graves with a fierce 
eye set on duty probing hither and thither in 
search after the missing coat; and each night the 
search becoming more strenuous and the mystery 
more baffling than ever. It had a funny likeness 
to the Jack Raikes episode in Evan Harrington , 
and pleased me more thus cropping up in real 
life. 

Well, I demanded there and then to be shown 
the subject of so much romance and adventure: 
and had the satisfaction of mending it, he sitting 
by in his shirt-sleeves the while, and watching de- 
lighted and without craven apologies. 

I notice it is not his own set he is ashamed 
of, but only the moneyed, high-sniffing servant- 
class who 1 ave no understanding for honorable 
poverty: and to be misunderstood pricks him 
in the' thinnest of thin places. 

He told me also that he brought only three 
white ties to last him for seven days: and that 
Graves placed them out in order of freshness 
and cleanliness night after night: — first three new 
ones consecutively, then three once worn. After 
that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all fur- 
ther responsibility, and laid out all three of them 
•for him to choose from. On the last three days 
of his stay he did me the honor to leave his coat 


176 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

out, declaring that my mendings had made it 
presentable before an emperor. Out of this 
dates the whole of his character, and I understand, 
what I did not, why Arthur and he got on to- 
gether. 

Now the house is empty, and your comings will 
be — I cannot say more welcome: but there will 
be more room for them to be after my own heart. 

Heaven be over us both. Faithfully your most 
loving. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


177 


LETTER LIII. 

Beloved, — I wish you could have been with me 
to look out into this garden last night when the 
spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but 
became sensitive of something outside not nor- 
mal. Whether my ear missed the usual echoes 
and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. 
To open the door was like slicing into a wedding- 
cake ; then, — where was I to put my foot into that 
new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out 
in a pair of my uncle’s. I suppose it is because 
I know every tree and shrub in its true form that 
snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: 
it becomes a garden of entombments. Now and 
then some heap would shuffle feebly under its 
shroud, but resurrection was not to be : the Law- 
son cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for 
me to shake and set free; and the silence was 
wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this 
morning I can see my big hoof-marks all over the 
place, and Benjy has been scampering about in 
them as if he found some flavor of me there. The 
trees are already beginning to shake themselves 
loose, and the spell is over : but it had a wonderful 
hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into 
12 


178 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


last night, and feel myself again full of romance 
without words that I cannot explain. If you had 
been there, even, I think I could have forgotten 
I had you by me, the place was so weighed down 
with its sense of solitude. It struck eleven while 
I was outside, and in that, too, I could hear a 
muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices 
and lay even on the outer edge of the bell itself. 
Across the park there are dead boughs cracking 
down under the weight of snow; and it would be 
very like you to tramp over just because the roads 
will be so impossible. 

I heard yesterday a thing which made me just 
a little more free and easy in mind, though I had 
nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good 
youth who two years ago believed I was his only 
possible future happiness, is now quite happy 
with a totally different sort of person. I had a 
little letter from him, shy and stately, announc- 
ing the event. I thought it such a friendly act, 
for some have never the grace to unsay their 
grievances, however much actually blessed as a 
consequence of them. 

With that off my mind I can come to you swear- 
ing that there have been no accidents on anybody’s 
line of life through a mistake in signals, or a fly- 
ing in the face of them, where I have had any 
responsibility. As for you, and as you know well 
by now, my signals were ready and waiting before 
you sought for them. “ Oh, whistle, and I’ll come 
to you ! ” was their give-away attitude. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


179 


I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. 
Good-by. If you come you will find this letter 
on the hall table, and me you will probably hear 
barking behind the rhododendrons. — So much 
your most loving. 


180 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LIY. 

Beloved, — We have been having a great day of 
tidyings out, rummaging through years and years 
of accumulations — things quite useless but which 
I have not liked to throw away. My soul has been 
getting such dusty answers to all sorts of doubt- 
ful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and 
the other lay hidden. And there were other 
things, the memory of which had lain quite dead 
or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted 
back into life like corn from the grave of an Egyp 
tian mummy. 

Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little 
collection of secret playthings which it used to 
be my fond belief that nobody knew of but my- 
self. It may have been Anna’s graspiness, when 
four years of seniority gave her double my age, 
or Arthur’s genial instinct for destructiveness, 
which drove me into such deep concealment of my 
dearest idols. But whether for those or more mys- 
tic reasons, I know I had dolls which I nursed 
only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firm- 
est love upon. It was because of them that I bore 
the reproach of being but a lukewarm mother of 
dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth be- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


181 


ing that my motherly passion expended itself in 
secret on certain outcasts of society whom others 
despised or had forgotten. They, on their limp 
and dissolute bodies, wore all the finery I could 
find to pile on them: and one shady transaction 
done on their behalf I remember now without 
pangs. There was one creature of state whom an 
inconsiderate relative had presented to Anna and 
myself in equal shares. Of course Anna’s became 
more and more lionlike. I had very little love 
for the bone of contention myself, but the sense 
of injustice rankled in me. So one day, at an un- 
folding, Anna discovered that certain under- 
garments were gone altogether away. She sat. 
aghast, questioned me, and, when I refused to 
disgorge, screamed down vengeance from the au- 
thorities. I was morally certain I had taken no 
more than my just share, and resolution sat on 
my lips under all threats. For a punishment the 
whole ownership of the big doll was made over to 
Anna : I was no worse off, and was very contented 
with my obstinacy. To-day I found the beauti- 
fully wrought bodice, which I had carried beyond 
reach of even the supreme court of appeal, cloth- 
ing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll whose 
head tottered on its stem like an over-ripe plum, 
and whose legs had no deportment at all ; and am 
sending it off in charitable surrender to Anna to 
he given, bag and rag, to whichever one of the 
children she likes to select. 

Also I found: — would you care to have a lock 


182 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


of hair taken from the head of a. child then two 
years old, which, bright golden, does not match 
what I have on now in the least? I can just re- 
member her: but she is much of a stranger to 
both of us. Why I value it is that the name and 
date on the envelope enclosing it are in my 
mother’s handwriting: and I suppose she loved 
very much the curly treasure she then put away. 
Some of the other things, quite funny, I will 
show you the next time you come over. How I 
wish that vanished mite had mixed some of her 
play-hours with yours: — you only six miles away 
all the time: had one but known! — Now grown 
very old and loving, always your own. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


183 


LETTER LV. 

Beloved, — I am getting quite out of letter-writ- 
ing, and it is your doing, not mine. No sooner 
do I get a line from you than you rush over in 
person and take the answer to it out of my 
mouth ! I have had six from you in the last week, 
and believe I have only exchanged you one: all 
the rest have been nipped in the bud by your ar- 
rivals. My pen turns up a cross nose whenever 
it hears you coming now, and declares life so dull 
as not to he worth living. Poor dinky little 
Othello ! it shall have its occupation again to-day, 
and say just what it likes. 

It likes you while you keep away: so that’s 
said ! When I make it write “ come,” it kicks and 
tries to say “ don’t.” For it is an industrious 
minion, loves to have work to do, and never com- 
plains of over-hours. It is a sentimental fact 
that I keep all its used-up brethren in an enclos- 
ure together, and throw none of them away. If 
once they have ridden over paper to you, I turn 
them to grass in their old age. I let this out be- 
cause I think it is time you had another laugh at 
me. 

Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you have done 


184 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


so if you want to make me a little more happy 
than I have been this last day or two. There has 
been too much thinking in the heads of both of 
us. Be empty-headed for once when you write 
next: whether you write little or much, I am sure 
always of your full heart : but I cannot trust your 
brain to the same pressure: it is such a Martha 
to headaches and careful about so many things, 
and you don’t bring it here to be soothed as often 
as you should — not at its most needy moments, I 
mean. 

Have you made the announcement? or does it 
not go till to-day? I am not sorry, since the move 
comes from her, that we have not to wait now till 
February. You will feel better when the storm 
is up than when it is only looming. This is the 
headachey period. 

Well. Say “ well ” with me, dearest ! It is go- 
ing to be well: waiting has not suited us — not 
any of us, I think. Your mother is one in a thou- 
sand, I say that and mean it: — worth conquering 
as all good things are. I would not wish great 
fortune to come by too primrosy a way. “ Canst 
thou draw out Leviathan with a hook ? ” Even 
so, for size, is the share of the world which we 
lay claim to, and for that we must be toilers of 
the deep. — Always, Beloved, your truest and most 
loving. - 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


1S5 


LETTER LVI. 

My own own Love, — You have given me a spring 
day before the buds begin, — the weather I have 
been longing for ! I had been quite sad at heart 
these cold wet days, really down ; — a treasonable 
sadness with you still anywhere in the world 
(though where in the world have you been?). 
Spring seemed such a long way off over the bend 
of it, with you unable to come; and it seems now 
another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it 
again, dearest, — all that was in it, with any blots 
that happened to come : — there was a dear smudge 
in to-day’s, with the whirlpool mark of your 
thumb quite clear on it, — delicious to rest my face 
against and feel you there.) 

And so back to my spring weather: all in a 
moment you gave me a whole week of the weather 
I had longed after. For you say the sun has been 
shining on you: and I would rather have it there 
than here if it refuses to be in two places at once. 
Also my letters have pleased you. When they do, 
I feel such a proud mother to them! Here they 
fly quick out of the nest; but I think sometimes 
they must come to you broken-winged, with so 
much meant and all so badly put. 


186 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


How can we ever, with our poor handful of 
senses, contrive to express ourselves perfectly? 
Perhaps, — I don't know: — dearest, I love you! 
I kiss you a hundred times to the minute. If 
everything in the world were dark round us, could 
not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to 
know of each other? — me that you were true and 
brave and so beautiful that a woman must be 
afraid looking at you: — and you that I was just 
my very self, — loving and — no! just loving: I 
have no room for anything more ! You have 
swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none 
left : I am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg. — 
Give me back crumbs of myself ! I am so hungry, 
I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred 
times. 

Dear share of the world, what a wonderful 
large helping of it you are to me ! I alter Portia’s 
complaint and swear that “ my little body is burst- 
ing with this great world." And now it is writ- 
ten and I look at it, it seems a Budge and Toddy 
sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven that the 
Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid 
the recognition of the ludicrous ! C was tell- 

ing me now long ago, in her own dull Protestant 
household, she heard a riddle propounded by some 
indiscreet soul who did not understand the prud- 
ish piety which reigned there: and saw such 
shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it. 
“What is it," was asked, “that a common man 
can see every day but that God never sees?" 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


187 


“ His equal 99 is the correct answer : but even so 
demure and proper a support to thirsty theology 
was to the ears that heard it as the hand of Uzzah 
stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smit- 
ten. As for C , a twinkle of wickedness seized 

her, she hazarded “ A joke 99 to be the true answer, 
and was ordered into banishment by the head of 
that God-fearing household for having so suc- 
cessfully diagnosed the family skeleton. 

As for skeletons, why your letter makes me so 
happy is that the one which has been rubbing its 
ribs against you for so long seems to have given 
itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution. And 
you are yourself again, as you have not been for 
many a long day. I suppose there has been thun- 
der, and the air is cleared : and I am not to know 
any of that side of your discomforts? 

Still I do know. You have been writing your 
letters with pressed lips for a month past: and I 
have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to 
you at all at all. Oh, why will she not love me? 
I know I am lovable except to a very hard heart, 
and hers is not: it is only like yours, reserved in 
its expression. It is strange what pain her preju- 
dice has been able to drop into my cup of happi- 
ness; and into yours, dearest, I fear, even more. 

Oh, I love you, I love you ! I am crying with 
it, having no words to declare to you what I feel. 
My tears have wings in them : first semi-detached, 
then detached. See, dearest, there is a rain-stain 
to make this letter fruitful of meaning ! 


188 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


It is sheer convention — and we, creatures of 
habit — that tears don’t come kindly and easily to 
express where laughter leaves off and a something 
better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical 
and entirely me, as I am when I get off my hinges 
too suddenly. 

Amen, amen! When we are both a hundred 
we shall remember all this very peaceably; and 
the “ sanguine flower” will not look back at us 
less beautifully because in just one spot it was 
inscribed with wo. And if we with all our aids 
cannot have patience, where in this midge-bitten 
world is that virtue to find a standing? 

I kiss you — how? as if it were for the first or 
the last time? No, but for all time. Beloved! 
every time I see you or think of you sums up my 
world. Love me a little, too, and I will be as con- 
tented as I am your loving. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


189 


LETTER LVII. 

Come to me ! I will not understand a word you 
have written till you come. Who has been using 
your hand to strike me like this, and why do you 
lend it? Oh, if it is she, you do not owe her that 
duty ! Never write such things : — speak ! have 
you ever found me not listen to you, or hard to 
convince? Dearest, dearest! — take what I mean: 
I cannot write over this gulf. Come to me, — I 
will believe anything you can say, but I can be- 
lieve nothing of this written. I must see you and 
hear what it is you mean. Dear heart, I am blind 
till I set eyes on you again ! Beloved, I have 
nothing, nothing in me but love for you: except 
for that I am empty! Believe me and give me 
time; I will not be unworthy of the joy of holding 
you. I am nothing if not yours! Tell this to 
whoever is deceiving you. 

Oh, my dearest, why did you stay away from me 
to write so? Come and put an end to a thing 
which means nothing to either of us. You love 
me : how can it have a meaning ? 

Can you not hear my heart crying? — I love no- 
body but you — do not know what love is without 


190 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


you ! How can I be more yours than I am ? Tell 
me, and I will be ! 

Here are kisses. Do not believe yourself till 
you have seen me. Oh, the pain of having to 
write , of not having your arms round me in my 
misery ! I kiss your dear blind eyes with all my 
heart. — My Love’s most loved and loving. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


191 


LETTER LVIII. 

No, no, I cannot read it ! What have I done that 
you will not come to me? They are mad here, 
telling me to be calm, that I am not to go to you. 
I too am out of my mind — except that I love you. 
I know nothing except that. Beloved, only on my 
lips will I take my dismissal from yours: not 
God himself can claim you from me till you have 
done me that justice. Kiss me once more, and 
then, if you can, say we must part. You cannot ! 
— Ah, come here where my heart is, and you can- 
not ! 

Have I never told you enough how I love you? 
Dearest, I have no words for all my love: I have 
no pride in me. Does not this alone tell you? — 
You are sending me away, and I cry to you to 
spare me. Can I love you more than that? What 
will you have of me that I have not given? Oh, 
you, the sun in my dear heavens — if I lose you, 
what is left of me ? Could you break so to pieces 
even a woman you did not love ? And me you do 
love, — you do. Between all this denial of me, 
and all this silence of words that you have put 
your name to, I see clearly that you are still my 
lover. — Your writing breaks with trying not to 


192 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


say it: you say again and again that there is no 
fault in me. I swear to you, dearest, there is 
none, unless it be loving you: and how can you 
mean that? For what are you and I made for 
unless for each other? With all our difference 
people tell us we are alike. We were shaped for 
each other from our very birth. Have we not 
proved it in a hundred days of happiness, which 
have lifted us up to the blue of a heaven higher 
than any birds ever sang? And now you say — 
taking on you the blame for the very life-blood 
in us both — that the fault is yours, and that your 
fault is to have allowed me to love you and your- 
self to love me ! 

Who has suddenly turned our love into a crime ? 
Beloved, is it a sin that here on earth I have been 
seeing God through you? Go away from me, and 
He is gone also. Ah, sweetheart, let me see you 
before all my world turns into a wilderness ! Let 
me know better why, — if my senses are to be 
emptied of you. My heart can never let you go. 
Do you wish that it should ? 

Bring your own here, and see if it can tell me 
that ! Come and listen to mine ! Oh, dearest 
heart that ever beat, mine beats so like yours that 
once together you shall not divide their sound ! 

Beloved, I will be patient, believe me, to any 
words you can say: but I cannot be patient away 
from you. If I have seemed to reproach you, do 
not think that now. For you are to give me a 
greater joy than I ever had before when you take 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


103 


me in your arms again after a week that has 
spelled dreadful separation. And I shall bless 
you for it — for this present pain even — because 
the joy will be so much greater. 

Only come: I do not live till you have kissed 
me again. Oh, my beloved, how cruel love may 
seem if we do not trust it enough ! My trust in 
you has come back in a great rush of warmth, like 
a spring day after frost. I almost laugh as 1 let 
this go. It brings you, — perhaps befoie I wake: 
1 shall be so tired to-night. Call under my win- 
dow, make me hear in my sleep. I will wake up 
to you, and it shall be all over before the rest of 
the world wakes. There is no dream so deep that 
I shall not near you out of the midst of it. Come 
and be my morning-glory to-morrow without fail. 

I will rewrite nothing that I have written — let it 
go! See me out of deep waters again, because I 
have thougnt so much of you! I have come 
through clouds and thick darkness. I press your 
name to my lips a thousand times. As sure as 
sunrise I say to myself that you will come: the' 
sun is not truer to his rising than you to me. 

Love will go flying after this till I sleep. God 
bless you! — and me also; it is all one and the 
same wish. — Your most true, loving, and dear 
faithful one. 

13 






194 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LIX. 

I have to own that I know your will now, at last. 
Without seeing you I am convinced: you have a 
strong power in you to have done that ! You have 
told me the word I am to say to }^ou: it is your 
bidding, so I say it — Good-by. But it is a word 
whose meaning I cannot share. 

Yet I have something to tell you which I could 
not have dreamed if it had not somehow been 
true: which has made it possible for me to be- 
lieve,, without hearing you speak it, that I am to 
he dismissed out of your heart. — May the doing 
of it cost you far less pain than I am fearing ! 

You did not come, though I promised myself 
so certainly that you would: instead came your 
last brief note which this is to obey. Still I 
watched for you to come, believing it still and 
trusting to silence on my part to bring }^ou more 
certainly than any more words could do. And at 
last either you came to me, or I came to you: a 
bitter last meeting. Perhaps your mind too holds 
what happened, if so I have got truly at what 
your will is. I must accept it as true, since I am 
not to see you again. I cannot tell you whether 
I thought it or dreamed it, but it seems still quite 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


195 


real, and has turned all my past life into a 
mockery. 

When I came I was behind you; then you 
turned and I could see your face — you too were in 
pain : in that we seemed one. But when I touched 
you and would have kissed you, you shuddered at 
me and drew hack your head. I tell you this as 
I would tell you anything unbelievable that I 
had. heard told of you behind your hack. You 
see I am obeying you at last. 

For all the love which you gave me when I 
seemed worthy of it I thank you a thousand times. 
Could you ever return to the same mind, I should 
be yours once more as I still am ; never ceasing 
on my side to be your lover and servant till death, 
and — if there be anything more — after as well. 

My lips say amen now: but my heart cannot 
say it till breath goes out of my body. Good-by: 
that means — God be with you. I mean it; but 
He seems to have ceased to be with me altogether. 
Good-by, dearest. I kiss your heart with writing 
for the last time, and your eyes, that will see 
nothing more from me after this. Good-by. 


Note. — All the letters which follow were found lying 
loosely together. They only went to their destination 
after the writers death. 


19G 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LX. 

To-day, clearest, a letter from you reached me : a 
fallen star which had lost its way. -It lies dead in 
my bosom. It was the letter that lost itself in the 
post while I w r as traveling: it comes now with 
half a dozen postmarks, and signs of long waiting 
in one place. In it you say, “ We have been 
engaged now for two whole months; I never 
dreamed that two moons could contain so much 
happiness.” Xor I, dearest ! We have now been 
separated for three; and till now I had not 
dreamed that time could so creep, to such infin- 
itely small purpose, as it has in carrying me from 
the moment when I last saw you. 

You rvere so dear to me, Beloved; that you 
ever are ! Time changes nothing in you as you 
seemed to me then. Oh, I am sick to touch your 
hands: all my thoughts run to your service: they 
seem to hear you call, only to find locked doors. 

If you could see me now I think you would 
open the door for a little while. 

If they came and told me — “You are to see 
him just for five minutes, and then part again” 
— what should I be wanting most to say to you? 
Nothing— only “speak, speak!” I would have 


LOVE-LETTEKS.* 


197 


you fill my heart with your voice the whole time : 
five minutes more of you to fold my life round. 
It would matter very little what you said, barring 
the one thing that remains never to be said. 

Oh, could all this silence teach me the one thing 
I am longing to know ! — why am I unworthy of 
you? If I cannot be your wife, why cannot I see 
you stilly — serve you if possible? I would be 
grateful. 

You meant to he generous: and wishing not 
to wound me, you said that “ there was no fault ” 
in me. I realize now that you would not have 
said that to the woman you still loved. And now 
I am never to know what part in me is hateful to 
you. 1 must live with it because you would not 
tell me the truth ! 

Every day tolls me I am different from the 
filing I wish fo be — your love, the woman you ap- 
prove. 

I love you, I love you ! Can I get no nearer to 
you ever for all this straining? If I love you so 
much, I must he moving toward what you would 
have me be. In our happiest days my heart had 
its growing pains, — growing to be as you wished 
it. 

Dear, even the wisest make mistakes, and the 
tenderest may be hard without knowing: I do not 
think I am unworthy of you, if vou knew all. 

Writing to you now seems weakness: yet it 
seemed peace to come in here and cry to you. 
And when I go about I have still strength left, 


198 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


and try to be cheerful. Nobody knows, I think 
nobody knows. No one in the house is made 
downcast because of me. How dear they are, and 
how little I can thank them ! Except to you, dear- 
est, 1 have not shown myself selfish. 

I love you too much, too much : I cannot write 

it. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


199 


LETTER LXL 

You are very ill, they tell me. Beloved, it is such 
kindness in them to have regard for the wish they 
disapprove and to let me know. Knowledge is the 
one thing needful whose lack has deprived me of 
my happiness: the express image of sorrow is 
not so terrible as the foreboding doubt of it. Xot 
because you are ill, but because I know something 
definitely about you, I am happier to-day : a little 
nearer to a semblance of service to you in my 
helplessness. How much I wish you well, even 
though that might again carry you out of my 
knowledge! And, though death might bring you 
nearer than life now makes possible, I pray to you, 
dearest, not to die. It is not right that you should 
die yet, with a mistake in your heart which a little 
more life might clear away. 

Praying for your dear eyes to remain open, I 
realize suddenly how much hope still remains in 
me, where I thought none was left. Even your 
illness I take as a good omen; and the thought of 
you weak -as a child and somewhat like one in 
your present state with no brain for deep thinking, 


f 


200 AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 

comes to my heart to be cherished endlessly : there 
you lie, Beloved, brought home to my imagina- 
tion as never since the day we parted. And the 
thought comes to the rescue of my helpless long- 
ing— that it is as little children that men get 
brought into the kingdom of Heaven. Let that 
be the medicine and outcome of your sickness, 
my own Beloved ! I hold my breath with hope 
that I shall have word of you when your hand 
has strength again to write. For I know that in 
sleepless nights and in pain you will be unable not 
to think of me. If you made resolutions against 
that when you were well, they will go now that 
you are laid weak; and so some power will come 
back to me, and my heart will never be asleep for 
thinking that yours lies awake wanting it: — nor 
ever be at rest for devising ways by which to be 
at the service of your conscious longing. 

Ah, my own one Beloved, whom I have loved so 
openly and so secretly, if you were as I think 
some other men are, I could believe that I had 
given you so much of my love that you had tired 
of me because I had made no favor of it but had 
let you see that I was your faithful subject and 
servant till death : so that after twenty years you, 
chancing upon an empty day in your life, might 
come back and find me still yours; — as to-morrow, 
if you came, you would. 

My pride died when I saw love looking out of 
your eves at me; and it has not come back to me 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


201 


now that I see you no more. I have no wish that 
it should. In all ways possible I would wish to 
be as I was when you loved me; and seek to 
change nothing except as you hid me. 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


m 


LETTER LXII. 

So I have seen you, Beloved, again, after fearing 
that I never should. A day’s absence from home 
has given me this great fortune. 

The pain of it was less than it might have been, 
since our looks did not meet. To have seen your 
eyes shut out their recognition of me would have 
hurt me too much: I must have cried out against 
such a judgment. But you passed by the window 
without knowing, your face not raised: so little 
changed, yet you have been ill. Arthur tells me 
everything: he knows I must have any word of 
you that goes begging. 

Oh, I hope you are altogether better, happier! 
An illness helps some people: the worst of their 
sorrow goes with the health that breaks down 
under it; and they come out purged into a clearer 
air, and are made whole for a fresh trial of life. 

I hear that you are going quite away; and my 
eyes bless this chance to have embraced you once 
again. Your face is the kindest I have ever seen: 
even your silence, while I looked at you, seemed 
a grace instead of a cruelty. What kindness, I 
say to myself, even if it be mistaken kindness, 


LOVE-LETTEKS. 


203 


must have sealed those dear lips not to tell me of 
my unworth ! 

Oh, if I could see once into the brain of it all ! 
Yo one but myself knows how good you are : how 
can I, then, be so unworthy of you? Did you 
think I would not surrender to anything you 
fixed, that you severed us so completely, not even 
allowing us to meet, and giving me no way to 
come back to you though I might come to be all 
that you wished ? Ah, dear face, how hungry you 
have made me ! — the more that I think you are 
not yet so happy as I could wish, — as I could 
make you, — I say it foolishly : — y r et if you would 
trust me, lam sure. 

Oh, how tired loving you now makes me ! phys- 
ically I grow weary with the ache to have you in 
my arms ! And I dream, I dream always, the 
shadows of former kindness that never grow warm 
enough to clasp me before I wake. — Yours, dear- 
est, waking or sleeping. 


ax Englishwomans 


X>0i 


LETTER LXIII. 


Do you remember, Beloved, when you came on 
your birthday, you said I was to give you another 
birthday present of your own choosing, and T 
promised? And it was that we were to do for 
the whole day what / wished: you were mot to be 
asked to choose. 

You said then that it was the first time I had 
ever let you have your own way, which was to see 
me be myself independently of you: — as if such a 
self existed. 

You will never see what I write now; and 1 did 
not do then any of the things I most wished: for 
first I wished to kneel down and kiss your hands 
and feet; and you would not have liked that. 
Even now that you love me no more, you would 
not like me to do such a thing. A woman can 
never do as she likes when she loves — there is no 
such thing until he shows it to her or she divines 
it. I loved you, I loved you ! — that was all I 
could do, and all I wanted to do. 

You have kept my letters? Do you read them 
ever, I wonder? and do they tell you differently 
about me, now that you see me with new eyes? 
Ah no, you dare not look at them: they tell too 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


205 


much truth! How can love-letters ever cease to 
be the winged things they were when they first 
came? I fancy mine sick to death for want of 
your heart to rest on; but never less loving. 

If you would read them again, you would come 
back to me. Those little throats of happiness 
would be too strong for you. And so you lay 
them in a cruel grave of lavender , — “ Lavender 
for forgetfulness ” might be another song for 
Ophelia to sing. 

I am weak with writing to you, I have writ- 
ten too long: this is twice to-day. 

I do not write to make myself more miserable: 
only to fill up my time. 

When I go about something definite, I can do 
it: — to ride, or read aloud to the old people, or 
sit down at meals with them is very easy; but I 
cannot make employment for myself — that re- 
quires too much effort of invention and will: and 
I have only will for one thing in life— to get 
through it : and no invention to the purpose. Oh, 
Beloved, in the grave I shall lie forever with a 
lock of your hair in my hand. I wonder if, be- 
yond there, one sees anything? My eyes ache 
to-day from the brain, which is always at blind 
groping for you, and the point where I missed 
you. 


20o 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LX IV. 

Dearest, — It is dreadful to own that I was glad 
at first to know that you and your mother were 
no longer together, glad of something that must 
mean pain to you ! I am not now. When you 
were ill I did a wrong thing: from her some- 
thing came to me which I returned. I would do 
much to undo that act now; but this has fixed it 
forever. With it were a few kind words. I could 
not bear to accept praise from her: all went back 
to her! Oh, poor thing, poor thing! if I ever 
had an enemy I thought it was she! I do not 
think so now. Those who seem cold seldom are. 
I hope you were with her at the last: she loved 
you beyond any word that was in her nature to 
utter, and the young are hard on the old without 
knowing it. We were two people, she arid I, whose 
love clashed jealously over the same object, and 
we both failed. She is the first to get rest. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


20 


LETTER LXV. 

My Dear, — I dream of you now every night, and 
you are always kind, always just as I knew you : 
the same without a shadow of change. 

I cannot picture you anyhow else, though mv 
life is full of the silence you have made. Mv 
heart seems to have stopped on the last heat tin* 
sight of your handwriting gave it. 

I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has 
made me a stranger to myself. I could not look 
at you and say “I am your Star”: — I could not 
believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited 
me, and the one here now is not the one you knew 
and loved: their one likeness is that they both 
have loved the same man, the one certain that her 
love was returned, and the other certain of noth- 
ing. What a world of difference lies in that ! 

I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel 
my skeleton pushing to the front : my glass shows 
it me. Thus we are all built up : bones are at 
the foundations of our happiness, and when the 
happiness wears thin, they show through, the true 
architecture of humanity. 

I have to realize now that I have become the 
greatest possible failure in life, — a woman who 


208 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


lias lost her “ share of the world 99 ; I try to shape 
myself to it. 

It is deadly when a woman’s sex, what was once 
her glory, reveals itself to her as an all-containing 
loss. I realized myself fully only when I was with 
you; and now I can’t undo it. — You gone, I lean 
against a shadow, and feel myself forever falling, 
drifting to no end, a Francesca without a Paolo. 
Well, it must he some comfort that I do not drag 
you with me. I never believed myself a “ strong ” 
woman; your lightest wish shaped me to its liking. 
Xow you have molded me with your own image 
and superscription, and have cast me away. 

Are not the die and the coin that comes from it 
only two sides of the same form ? — there is not a 
hairsbreadth anywhere between their surfaces 
where they lie, the one enclosing the other. Yet 
part them, and the light strikes on them how dif- 
ferently! That is a mere condition of light: join 
them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, 
and they are the same — two faces of a single 
form. So you and I, dear, when we are dead, 
shall come together again, I trust. Or are we to 
come back to each other defaced and warped out 
of our true conjunction? I think not: for if you 
have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be 
melted again by your touch, and flow to meet all 
the change that is in you, since my true self is to 
be you. 

Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either 
with or without thoughts of me ? I cannot under- 


209 


LOVE-LETTERS. 

stand, but I trust that it may be so. If I could 
have a reason why I have so passed out of your 
life, I could endure it better. What was in me 
that you did not wish? What was in you that I 
must not wish for evermore? If the root of this 
separation was in you, if in God’s will it was 
ordered that we were to love, and, without loving 
less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so 
willingly. But it is this knowing nothing that 
overwhelms me: — I strain my eyes for sight and 
can’t see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight 
and am given great handfuls of darkness. I said 
to you the sun had dropped out of my heavens. — 
My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you ? 
Am I in the mold with my face to yours, receiv- 
ing the close impression of a misery in w r hich we 
are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and 
thirsting for me, as I now for you ? 

I wonder what, to the starving and drought- 
stricken, the taste of death can be like ! Do all 
the rivers of the world run together to the lips 
then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste 
when the long deprivation ceases to be a want? 
Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and thirst — 
an antidote to it all? 

I may know soon. How very strange if at the 
last I forget to think of you ! 

14 


210 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LXVI. 

Dearest, — Every day I am giving myself a little 
more pain than I need — for the sake of yon. I 
am giving myself your letters to read again day 
by day as I received them. Only one a day, so 
that I have still something left to look forward 
to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what unanswerable 
things they have now become, those letters which 
I used to answer so easily ! There is hardly a 
word but the light of to-dav stands before it like 
a drawn sword, between the heart that then felt 
and wrote so, and mine as it now feels and waits. 

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty 
now: only seems , dearest, for I still say, I do 
say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I, who 
know nothing else, know that ! So I look every 
day at one of these monstrous contradictions, and 
press it to my heart till it becomes reconciled with 
the pain that is there always. 

Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words 
which I took so much for granted then have a 
strange force now that I look back at them. You 
did love: and I who did not realize it enough 
then, realize it now when you no longer do. 

And the commentary on all this is that one 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


211 


letter of yours which I say over and over to my- 
self sometimes when I cannot pray : “ There is no 
fault in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no 
longer love you as I did. All that was between 
us must be at an end; for your good and mine 
the only right thing is to say good-by without 
meeting. I know you will not forget me, but you 
will forgive me, even because of the great pain I 
cause you. You are the most generous woman 1 
have known. If it would comfort you to blame 
me for this I would beg you to do it : but I know 
you better, and ask you to believe that it is my 
deep misfortune rather than my fault that I can 
be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was 
once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me 
you remain what I always found you, the best 
and most true-hearted woman a man could pray 
to meet.” 

This, dearest, I say and say: and write down 
now lest you have forgotten it. For your writing 
of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes 
with me to my grave. How superstitious we are 
of our own bodies after death ! — I, as if I believed 
that I should ever rise or open my ears to any 
sound again ! I do not, yet it comforts me to 
make sure that certain things shall go with me to 
dissolution. 

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great de- 
ceiver, and that no one quite quite wishes not to 
exist. I have no belief in future existence; yet I 
wish it so much — to exist again Qutside all thij 


212 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


failure of my life. For at present I have done 
you no good at all, only evil. 

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to 
you I am not writing altogether in vain. If I 
can see sufficiently at the last to say — Send him 
these, it will be almost like living again: for 
surely you will love me again when you see how 
much I have suffered, — and suffered because I 
would not let thought of you go. 

Could you dream, Beloved, reading this, that 
there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper 
as I write? 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


113 


LETTER LXVII. 

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, 
Beloved ? I do not know in what way I can have 
hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps with- 
out knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds 
we have given and received? Dearest, I trust 
those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till 
I grow weak. My arms strain and become tired 
trying to be wings to carry them to you: and I 
am glad of that weariness — it seems to be some 
virtue that has gone out of me. If all my body 
could go out 'n the effort, I think I should get e 
glimpse of your face, and the meaning of every- 
thing then at last. 

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in 
love’s cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you. 
It comes from a graveyard full of “ little deaths.” 
T remember, once sending you a flower from the 
same place when love was still fortunate with us. 
1 must have been reckless in my happiness to do 
that ! 

Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my 
thoughts till I had emptied myself of* them, I feel 
that I should rest. But there is no emptying the 
brain by thinking. Things thought come to be 


214 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


thought again over and over, and more and fresh 
come in their train: children and grandchildren, 
generations of them, sprung from the old stock. 
I have many thoughts now, born of my love for 
you, that never came when we were together, — 
grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some 
of them are set down here, but others escape and 
will never see your face ! 

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of 
a future life) : still, if you should ever come back 
to me and want, as you would want, to know some- 
thing of the life in between, — I could put these 
letters that I keep into your hands and trust them 
to say for me that no day have I been truly, that 
is to say willingly, out of your heart. When 
Ki chard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you 
remember how she takes him to see their child, 
which till then he had never seen — and its like- 
ness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not 
been as true to you in all that I leave here 
written ? 

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer 
glimpse of your mind, and am sure of what you 
would wish, I will leave word that these shall be 
sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is 
still delayed, not that it will not reach you. 

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For 
my poor body’s sake I wish Well to have its last 
chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy un- 
fulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its 
share of things set ghosts to walk : mists which rise 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


215 


out of a ground that lias not worked out its fruit- 
fulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I 
leave a ghost, it will take your shape, not mine, 
dearest: for it will be “ as trees walking.” that the 
"lovers of trees” will come back to earth. 
Browning did not know that. Some one else, not 
Browning, lias worded it for us: a lover of trees 
far away sends his soul back to the country that 
has lost him, and there “ the traveler, marveling 
why, halts on the bridge to hearken how soft the 
poplars sigh,” not knowing that it is the lover 
himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is 
how the ghosts of real love come back into the 
world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts of 
hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, 
and those none. Come to me, dearest, in the 
blackest night, and I will not be afraid. 

How strange that when one has suffered most, 
it is the poets (those who are supposed to sing) 
who best expiess things for us. Yet singing is the 
thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke 
up to find itself full of tune, it was mine ; now 
you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied it 
dry: and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I 
think it is their cruelty that appeals to me: — they 
can sing of grief ! 0 hard hearts ! 

Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have sud- 
denly become wide open to the night-sounds out- 
side. A night-jar is making its beautiful burr in 
the stillness, and there are things going away and 
away, telling me the whereabouts of life like 


216 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


points on a map made for the ear. You, too, 
are somewhere outside, making no sound: and 
listening for you I heard these. It seemed as if 
my brain had all at once opened and caught a new 
sense. Are you there? This is one of those 
things which drop to us with no present meaning: 
yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live. 

Good night ! At your head, at your feet, is 
there any room for me to-night, Beloved? 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


217 


LETTER LXVIII. 


Dearest, — The thought keeps troubling me how 
to give myself to you most, if you should ever 
come back for me when I am no longer here. 
These poor letters are all that I can leave: will 
they tell you enough of my heart? 

Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and 
i t is there already ! My heart, dearest, only moves 
in the wish to be what you desire. 

Yet I am conscious that I cannot give, unless 
you shall choose to take: and though I write my- 
self down each day your willing slave, I cry my 
wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear 
me. 

Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is 
little you know of it. My wish would be to have 
every } r ear of my life blessed by your conscious- 
ness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you 
have, truly, to remember: though I think five 
summers at least came to flower, and withered in 
that one. 

I wish you knew my whole life: I cannot tell 


218 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


it : it was too full of infinitely small things. Yet 
what I can remember I would like to tell now: 
so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood 
may here and there be warmed long after its 
death by your knowledge coming to it and dis- 
covering in it more than you knew before. 

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look 
u]) some day and meet your eye! Beloved, then, 
however faded the ink may have grown, I think 
the spirit of my love will remain fresh in it: — I 
kiss you on the lips with every word. The thought 
of “ good-by” is never to enter here: it is A 
reviderci forever and ever: — “ Love, love,” and 
“ meet again ! ” — the words we put into the 
thrush’s song on a day you will remember, when 
all the world for us was a garden. 

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,— 
little things they must be — I will: and I know 
that if you ever come to value them at all, their 
littleness will make them doubly welcome: — just 
as to know that you were once called a “ gallous 
young hound ” by people whom you plagued when 
a boy, was to me a darling discovery: all at once 
I caught my childhood’s imaginary comrade to 
my young spirit’s heart and kissed him, brow and 
eyes. 

Good night, good night! To-morrow I will 
find }mu some earliest memory: the dew of Her- 
mon be on it when you come to it — if ever ! 

Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, 


LOVE-LETTERS. 2lS 

or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for 
us ; and my childhood would stay unwritten ! 

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you 
for the kiss I cannot give. Good night ; dearest. 


220 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LXIX. 

Beloved, — I remember my second birthday. I 
am quite sure of it, because my third I remember 
so infinitely well. — Then I was taken in to see 
Arthur lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes 
and gauze, and received in my arms held up for 
me by Nan-nay the awful weight and imperial 
importance of his small body. 

I think from the first I was told of him as my 
•'*' brother ” : cousin I have never been able to 
think him. But all this belongs to my third: on 
my second, I remember being on a floor of 
roses; and they told me if I would go across to a 
cupboard and pull it open there would be some- 
thing there waiting for me. And it was on all- 
fours that I went all eagerness across great patches 
of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through 
a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of 
bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes in 
the wood lying. 

I think they gave me my first sense of color, 
except, perhaps, the rose-carpet which came 
earlier, and they remained for quite a long time 
the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange 
that I cannot remember what became of them, 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


221 


for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them, — 
perhaps it was done for me: Arthur came after- 
wards, the tomb of many of my early joys, and 
the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is 
the one, the only one, who has seen the tears that 
belong truly to you: and he blesses me with such 
wonderful patience when I speak your name, al- 
lowing that perhaps I know better than he. And 
after the wax babies I had him for my third birth- 
day. 


222 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LXX. 

Beloved, — I think that small children see very 
much as animals must do: just the parts of things 
which have a direct influence on their lives, and 
no memory outside that. I remember the kindness 
or frowns of faces in early days far more than the 
faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct and 
later memory that I have of standing within a 
doorway and watching my mother pass down- 
stairs unconscious of my being there, — and then , 
for the first time, studying her features and see- 
ing in them a certain solitude and distance which 
1 bad never before noticed: — I suppose because I 
Jiad never before thought of looking at her when 
she was not concerned with me. 

It was this unobservance of actual features, I 
imagine, which made me think all gray-haired 
people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing 
those who called, except generically as callers — 
people who kissed me, and whom therefore I liked 
to see. 

One, I remember, for no reason unless because 
she had a brown face, I mistook from a distance 
for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room 
where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


223 


it was my earliest conscious test of politeness, 
when I found out my mistake, not to cry over it 
in the kind but very inferior presence to that one 
I had hoped for. 

1 suppose, also, that many sights which have no 
meaning to children go, happily, quite out of 
memory; and that what our early years leave for 
us in the mind’s lavender are just the tit-bits of 
life, or the first blows to our intelligence — things 
which did matter and mean much. 

Corduroys come early into my life, — their color 
and the queer earthy smell of those which par- 
ticularly concerned me: because I was picked up 
from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough 
working-man so .clothed, whom I regarded for a 
long time afterwards as an adorable object. He 
and I lived to mv recognition of him as a wizened, 
scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good 
friends after the romance was over. I don’t know 
when the change in my sense of beauty took place 
as regards him. 

Anything unusual that appealed to my senses 
left exaggerated marks. My father once in full 
uniform appeared to me as a giant, so that I 
screamed and ran, and required much of his 
kindest voice to coax me back to him. 

Also once in the street a dancer in fancy cos- 
tume struck me in the same way, and seemed in 
his red tunic twice the size of the people who 
crowded round him. 

I think as a child the small ground-flowers of 


224 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


spring took a larger hold upon me than any 
others: — I was so close to them. Roses I don’t 
remember till I was four or five; hut crocus and 
snowdrop seem to have been in my blood from the 
very beginning of things; and I remember liken- 
ing the green inner petals of the snowdrop to the 
skirts of some ballet-dancing dolls, which danced 
themselves out of sight before I was four years 
old. 

Snapdragons, too, I remember as if with my 
first summer: I used to feed them with bits of 
their own green leaves, believing faithfully that 
those mouths must need food of some sort. When 
I became more thoughtful I ceased to make can- 
nibals of them: but I think I was less convinced 
then of the digestive process. I don’t know when 
I left off feeding snapdragons: I think calceo- 
larias helped to break me off the habit, for I found 
they had no throats to swallow with. 

In much the same way as sights that have no 
meaning leave no traces, so I suppose do words 
and sounds. It was many years before I over- 
heard, in the sense of taking in, a conversation 
by elders not meant for me: though once, in my 
innocence, I hid under the table during the elders’ 
late dinner, and came out at dessert, to which w T e 
were always allowed to come down, hoping to be 
an amusing surprise to them. And I could not 
at all understand why I was scolded; for, indeed, 
I had heard nothing at all, though no doubt 
plenty that was unsuitable for a child’s ears had 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


225 


been said, and was on the elders’ minds when they 
upbraided me. 

Dearest, such a long-ago ! and all these smallest 
of small things I remember again, to lay them up 
for you: all the child-parentage of me whom you 
loved once, and will again if ever these come to 
you. 

Bless my childhood, dearest*: it did not know it 
was lonely of you, as I know of myself now ! And 
yet I have known you, and know you still, so am 
the more blest. — Good night. 

15 


22G 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LXXI. 

I used to stand at the foot of the stairs a long 
time, when by myself, before daring to start up: 
and then it was always the right foot that went 
first. And a fearful feeling used to accompany 
me that I was going to meet the “ evil chance ” 
when I got to the corner. Sometimes when I 
felt it was there very badly, I used at the last 
moment to shut my eyes and walk through it: 
and feel, on the other side, like a pilgrim who had 
come through the waters of Jordan. 

My eyes were always the timidest things about 
me : and to shut my eyes tight against the dark 
was the only way I had of meeting the solitude of 
the first hour of bed* when Nan-nan had left me, 
and before I could get to sleep. 

I have an idea that one listens better with one’s 
eyes shut, and that this and other things are a 
remnant of our primitive existence when perhaps 
the ears of our arboreal ancestors kept a look-out 
while the rest of their senses slept. I think, also, 
that the instinct I found in myself, and have 
since in other children, to conceal a wound is a 
similar survival. At one time, I suppose, m the 


LOVE-LETTEES. 


227 


human herd the damaged were quickly put out of 
existence; and it was the self-preservation in- 
stinct which gave me so keen a wish to get into 
hiding when one day I cut my finger badly — some- 
thing more than a mere scratch, which I would 
have cried over and had bandaged quite in the cor- 
rect way. I remember I sat in a corner and pre- 
tended to be nursing a rag doll which I had 
knotted round my hand, till Nan-nan noticed, per- 
haps, that I looked white, and found blood flowing 
into my lap. And I can recall still the overcoming 
comfort which fell upon me as I let resolution go, 
and sobbed in her arms full of pity for myself 
and scolding the “ naughty knife ” that had done 
the deed. The rest of that day is lost to me. 

Yet it is not only occasions of happiness and 
pain which impress themselves. When the mind 
takes a sudden stride in consciousness — that, also, 
fixes itself. I remember the agony of shyness 
which came on me when strange hands did my un- 
dressing for me once in Nan-nan’s absence: — the 
first time I had felt such a thing. And another 
day I remember, after contemplating the head of 
Judas in a pictorial puzzle for a long time, that 
I seized a brick and pounded him with it beyond 
recognition : — these were the first vengeful be- 
ginnings of Christianity in me. All my history, 
Bible and English, came to me through picture- 
books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes 
of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many 
kings, princes, and governors who incurred my dis- 


228 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


pleasure, scratching them with pins till only a 
white blur remained on the paper. 

All this comes to me quite seriously now: I 
used to laugh thinking it over. But can a single 
thing we do be called trivial, since out of it we 
grow up minute by minute into a whole being 
charged with capacity for gladness or suffering? 

Now, as I look hack, all these atoms of memory 
are dust and ashes that I have walked through in 
order to get to present things. How I suffer! 
How I suffer ! If you could have dreamed that a 
human body could contain so much suffering, I 
think you would have chosen a less dreadful way 
of showing me your will: you would have given 
me a reason why I have to suffer so. 

Dearest, I am broken off every habit I ever had, 
except my love of you. If you would come back to 
me you could shape me into whatever you wished. 
I will be different in all but just that one thing. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


229 


LETTER LXXII. 

Here in my pain. Beloved, I remember keenly 
now the one or two occasions when as a small 
child 1 was consciously a cause of pain to others. 
What an irony of life that once of the two times 
when I remember to have been cruel, it was to 
Arthur, with his small astonished baby-face re- 
maining a reproach to me ever after ! I was 
hardly five then, and going up to the nursery 
from down-stairs had my supper-cake in my hand, 
only a few mouthfuls left. He had been having 
his bath, and was sitting up on Xan-nan’s knee 
being got into his bedclothes; when spying me with 
my cake he piped to have a share of it. I daresay 
it would not have been good for him, but of that 
I thought nothing at all: the cruel impulse took 
me to make one mouthful of all that was left. 
He watched it go without crying; but his eyes 
opened at me in a strange way, wondering at this 
sudden lesson of the hardness of a human heart. 
“All gone!” was what' he said, turning his head 
from me up to Xan-nan, to see perhaps if she 
too had a like surprise for his wee intelligence. 
I think I have never forgiven myself that, 
though Arthur has no memory of it left in him: 


AN ENGLiSlt WOMAN’S 


230 


the judging remembrance of it would, I believe, 
win forgiveness to him for any wrong he might 
now do me, if that and not the contrary were his 
way with me-: so unreasonably is my brain scarred 
where the thought of it still lies. God may for- 
give us our trespasses by marvelous slow ways; 
but we cannot always forgive them ourselves. 

The other thing came out of a less personal 
greed, and was years later: Arthur and I were 
collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the 
out-houses there was a swallow’s nest too high up 
to be reached by any ladder we could get up there. 
1 was intent on getting the eggs, and thought of 
no other thing that might chance: so I spread a 
soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the 
floor of the nest. Then with a sudden stir of hor- 
ror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, 
tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the break- 
age that fell with them, but one was quite alive 
and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the 
nest and set it with the young one in it by the 
loft-window where the parent-birds might see, 
making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my con- 
science. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: 
they returned, first up to the rafters, then darting 
round and round and crying; then to where their 
little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it 
with a nibbling movement of their beaks for a 
moment, making my miserable heart bound up 
with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the 
July-sunshine. Once they came back, and shrieked 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


231 


at the horror of it all, and fled away not to re- 
turn. 

I remained for hours and did whatever silly 
pity could dictate: but of course the young one' 
died: and I — cleared away all remains that no- 
body might see! And that I gave up egg-col- 
lecting after that was no penance, but choice. 
Since then the poignancy of my regret when 1 
think of it has never softened. The question 
which pride of life and love of make-believe till 
then had not raised in me, “ Am I a god to kill 
and to make alive?” was answered all at once by 
an emphatic “ No,” which I never afterwards for- 
got. But the grief remained all the same, that 
life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had 
to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three 
frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing 
hut pain and a last miserable dart away into The 
bright sunshine the spring work of two swift- 
winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to 
think, not worth many sparrows? Oh, Beloved, 
sometimes I doubt it ! and would in thought give 
my life that those swallows in their generations 
might live again. 

Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell 
you of my childhood end in a sad way. For it is 
no use, no use: I have not to-day a glimmer of 
hope left that your eyes will ever rest on ^yhat I 
have been at such deep trouble to write. 

If I were being punished for these two childish 
things I did, I should see a side of jristice in it 


232 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


all. But it is for loving you I am being punished : 
and not God Himself shall make me let you go ! 
Beloved, Beloved, all my days are at your feet, 
and among them days when you held me to your 
heart. Good night; good night always now! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


233 


LETTER LXXIII. 


Dearest, — I could never have made any appeal 
from you to anybody: all my appeal has been to 
you alone. I have wished to hear reason from no 
other lips but yours; and had you but really and 
deeply confided in me, I believe I could have sub- 
mitted almost with a light heart to what you 
thought best : — though in no way and by no 
stretch of the imagination can I see you coming 
to me for the last time and saying, as you only 
wrote, that it was best we should never see each 
other again. 

You could not have said that with any sound of 
truth; and how can it look truer frozen into writ- 
ing? I have kissed the words, because you wrote 
them; not believing them. It is a suspense of 
unbelief that you have left me in, oh, still dear- 
est ! Yet never was sad heart truer to the foun- 
tain of all its joy than mine to yours. You had 
only to see me to know that. 

Some day, I dream, we shall come suddenly 
together, and you will see, before a word, before 
I have time to gather my mind back to the bodily 
comfort of your presence, a face filled with 
thoughts of you that have never left it, and never 


234 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


been bitter: — I believe never once bitter. For 
even when I think, and convince myself that you 
have wronged yourself — and so, me also, — even 
then : oh, then most of all, my heart seems to break 
with tenderness, and my spirit grow more famished 
than ever for the want of you ! For if you have 
done right, wisely, then you have no longer any 
need of me: Lut if you have done wrong, then 
you must need me. Oh, dear heart, let that need 
overwhelm you like a sea, and bring you towards 
me on its strong tide ! And come when you will 
I shall be waiting. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


2'3o 


LETTER LXXIV. 


Dearest and dearest, — So long as you are still 
this to my heart I trust to have strength to write 
it; though it is but a ghost of old happiness that 
comes to me in the act. I have no hope now left 
in me : but I love you not less, only more, if that 
be possible: or is it the same love with just a 
weaker body to contain it all ? I find that to have 
definitely laid off all hope gives me a certain re- 
lief: for now that I am so hopeless it becomes 
less hard not to misjudge you — not to say and 
think impatiently about you things which would 
explain why I had to die like this. 

Dearest, nothing but love shall explain anything 
of you to me. When I think of your dear face, it 
is only love that can give it its meaning. If love 
would teach me the meaning of this silence, I 
would accept all the rest, and not ask for any 
joy in life besides. For if I had the meaning, 
however dark, it would be by love speaking to me 
again at last; and I should have your hand hold- 
ing mine in the darkness forever. 


236 


AX ENGLISHWOMANS 


Your face, Beloved, I can remember so well 
that it would be enough if I had your hand : — the 
meaning, just the meaning, why J have to sit 
blind. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


23 


-v 

i 


LETTER LXXV. 

Dearest, — There is always one possibility which 
I try to remember in all I write: even where 'there 
is no hope a thing remains possible : — that your 
eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave 
here. And I would have nothing so dark as to 
make it seem that I were better dead than to have 
come to such a pass through loving you. If I 
felt that, dearest, I should not be writing my 
heart out to you, as I do : when I cease doing that 
I shall indeed have become dead and not want vou 
any more, I suppose. How far I am from dying, 
then, now ! 

So be quite sure that if now, even now, — for 
to-day of all days has seemed most dark — if now 
I were given my choice — to have known you or 
not to have known you, — Beloved, a thousand 
times I would claim to keep what I have, rather 
than have it taken away from me. I cannot for- 
get that for a few months I was the happiest 
woman I ever knew: and that happiness is per- 
haps oply by present conditions removed from 
me. If I have a soul, I believe good will come 
back to it; because I have done nothing to dc- 


238 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


serve this darkness unless by loving yon: and if 
by loving you, I am glad that the darkness came. 

Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this: 
7 have not, and cannot have. Something that you 
have not chosen for me to know, you know: it 
should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not 
to have shared it with me. Maybe there is some- 
thing I know that you do not. In the way of sor- 
row, I think and wish — yes. In the way of love, 
I wish to think — no. 

Any more thinking wearies me. Perhaps we 
have loved too much, and have lost our way out of 
our poor five senses, without having strength to 
take over the new world which is waiting beyond 
them. Well, I would rather, Beloved, suffer 
through loving too much, than through loving too 
little. It is a good fault as faults go. And it is 
my fault, Beloved: so some day you may have to 
be tender to it. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


239 


LETTER LXXVI. 

Dearest, — I feel constantly that we are together 
still : I cannot explain. When I am most miser- 
able, even so that I feel a longing to fly out of 
reach of the dear household voices which say shy 
things to keep me cheerful, — I feel that I have 
you in here waiting for me. Heart’s heart, in my 
darkest, it is you who speak to me ! 

As I write I have my cheek pressed against 
yours. Xone of it is true: not a word, not a day 
that has separated us ! I am yours : it is only the 
poor five senses part of us that spells absence. 
Some day, some day you will answer this letter 
which has to stay locked in my desk. Some day, 
I mean, an answer will reach me: — without your 
reading this, your answer will come. Is not your 
heart at this moment answering me ? 

Dearest, I trust you : I could not have dreamed 
you to myself, therefore you must be true, quite 
independently of me. You as I saw you once with 
open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make 
yourself, Beloved, not to he what you are: you 
have called my soul to life if for no other reason 
than to bear witness of you, come what may. X o 
length of silence can make a truth once sounded 


240 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing 
it makes its way to the stars: dispersed or re- 
moved it cannot be lost. I too, for truth’s sake, 
may have to be dispersed out of my present self 
which shuts me from you: but I shall find you 
some day, — you who made me, you who every day 
make me ! A j art of you cut off, I suffer pain be- 
cause I am still part of you. If I had no part in 
you I should suffer nothing. But I do, I do. One 
is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still 
feels it, — not the pleasure of it but the pain. 
Dearest, are you aware of me now ? 

Because I am suffering, you shall not think 
I am entirely miserable. But here and now I am 
all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at 
times to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point 
at which it assuages itself and becomes healing: 
that pain is not endurance wasted ; but that I and 
my weary body have a goal which will give a 
meaning to all this, somehow, somewhere: — never, 
I begin to fear, here, while this body has charge of 
me. 

Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry : 
and having worn myself out with it and ended, I 
kiss your lips and bless God that I have known 
you. 

I have not said — I never could say it — “ Let 
the day perish wherein Love was born ! ” I forget 
nothing of you : you are clear to me, — all but one 
thing: why we have become as we are now, — one 
whole, parted and sent different ways. And yet 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


241 


so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow 
is yours: I wet your face with my tears and crv, 
“ Sleep well.” 

To-night also. Beloved, sleep well ! Night and 
morning I make you my prav^r. 

16 


242 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LXXVII. 

My own one beloved, my dearest dear ! Want me, 
please want me! I will keep alive for you. Say 
you wish me to live, — not come to you: don’t say 
that if .you can’t — but just wish me to live, and I 
will. Yes, I will do anything, even live, if you 
tell me to do it. I will be stronger than all the 
world or fate, if you have any wish about me at 
all. Wish well, dearest, and surely the knowledge 
will come to me. Wish big things of me, or little 
things: wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better 
because of it. Wish anything of me: only not 
that I should love you better. I can’t, dearest, I 
can’t. Any more of that, and love would go out 
of my body and leave it clay. If you would even 
wish that, I would be happy at finding a way to 
do your will below ground more perfectly than 
any I found on it. Wish, wish: only wish some- 
thing for me to do. Oh, I could rest if I had but 
your little finger to love. The tyranny of love is 
when it makes no bidding at all. That you have 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


243 


no want or wish left in you as regards me is my 
continual despair. My own, my beloved, my tor- 
mentor and comforter, my ever dearest dear, 
whom I love so much ! 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


2U 


LETTER LXXVIII. 

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is toe 
much for me. Come to me somehow, dear ghost 
of all my happiness, and take me in your arms ! 
I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do : I 
must. It is only our senses that divide us; and 
mine are all famished servants waiting for their 
master. They have nothing to do but watch for 
you, and pretend that they believe you will come. 
Oh, it is grievous! 

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? 
They go out of me in sharp stabs of pain: they 
must go somewhere for me to be delivered of them 
/ only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should 
make me hate you, if that were possible: how, 
instead, I love you more and more, and shall, dear- 
est, and will till I die ! 

I will die, because in no other way can I express 
how much I love you. I am possessed by all the 
y ■ despairing words about lost happiness that the 
poets have written. They go through me like 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


245 


ghosts : T am haunted by them : but they are 
bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the 
other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I 
alone have blood in me.y Nobody ever loved as 
I love since the world began. 

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of 
me poured out until I feel in myself only the 
dregs left : and still in them is the fire and the 
suffering. 

No: but I will be better: it is better to have 
known you than not. Give me time, dearest, to 
get you to heart again ! I cannot leave you like 
this : not with such words as these for “ good 
night ! ” 

Oh, dear face, dear unforgetable lost face, my 
soul strains up to look for you through the blind 
eyes that have been left to torment me because 
they can ne ver behold you. Very often I have 
seen you looking grieved, shutting awaj^.some sor- 
row in yourself quietly: but never once angry or 
impatient at any of the small follies of men. 
Come, then, anc look at me patiently now ! I am 
your blind girl : I must cry out because I cannot 
see } 7 ou. Only make me believe that you yet think 
of me as, when you so unbelievably separated us, 
you said you had always found me — “the dearest 
and most true-hearted woman a man could pray 
to meet/’ Beloved, if in your heart I am still 
that, separation does not matter. I can wait, I 
can wait. \ 


24G 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


I kiss your feet : even to-morrow may bring the 
light. God bless you! I pray it more than ever; 
because to me to-night has been so very dark. 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


247 


LETTER LXXIX. 

Dearest, — I have not written to you for three 
weeks. At last I am better again. You seem to 
have been waiting for me here: always wondeiing 
when I would come back. I do come back, you 
see. 

Dear heart, how are you ? I kiss your feet ; you 
are my one only happiness, my great one. Words 
are too cold and cruel to write anything for me. 
Picture me: I am too weak to write more, but I 
have written this, and am so much better for it. 

Reward me some day by reading what is here. 
I kiss, because of you, this paper which I am too 
tired to fill any more. 

Love, nothing but love ! Into every one of these 
dead words my heart has been beating, trying to 
lay down its life and reach to you. 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


24.S 


LETTER LXXX. 

A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon : be- 
fore I am done with twenty-three I shall have 
passed my age. Beloved, it hurts me more than I 
can say that the news of it should come to you 
from any one but me : for this, though I write it, 
is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined soul 
even in the pains that gave it birth. Yes, it does 
pain me, frightens me even, that I must die all 
by myself, and feeling still so young. I thought 
I should look forward to it, but I do not; no, no, 
I would give much to put it off for a time, until 
I could know what it will mean for me as regards 
you. Oh, if you only knew and cared, what wild 
comfort I might have in the knowledge! It seems 
strange that if I were going away from the chance 
of a perfect life with you I should feel it with less 
pain than 1 feel this. The dust and the ashes of 
life arc all that I have to let fall: and it is bitter- 
ness itself to part with them. 

How we grow to love sorrow! Joy is never so 
much a possession — it goes over us, encloses us like 
air or sunlight ; but sorrow goes into us and be- 
comes part of our flesh and bone. So that I, hold- 
ing up my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow red 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


249 


and transparent like stained glass between me and 
the light of day, sorrow that has become insepa- 
rably mine, and is the very life I am wishing to 
keep ! 

Dearest, will the world be more bearable to you 
when I am out of it? It is selfish of me not to 
wish so, since I can satisfy you in this so soon ! 
Every day I will try to make it my wish : or wisli 
t hat it may be so when the event comes — not a 
day before. Till then let it be more bearable that 
I am still alive: grant me, dearest, that one little 
grace while I live ! 

Bearable ! My sorrow -is bearable, I suppose, 
because I do bear it from day to day: otherwise I 
would declare it not to be. Don’t suffer as I do, 
dearest, unless that will comfort you. 

One thing is strange, but I feel quite certain of 
it: when I heard that I carried death about in me, 
scarcely an arm’s length away, I thought quickly 
to myself that it was not the solution of the mys- 
tery. Others might have thought that it was: 
that because I was to die so soon, therefore I was 
not fit to be your wife. But I know it was not 
that. I know that whatever hopes death in me 
put an end to, you would have married me and 
loved me patiently till I released you, as I am to 
so soon. 

It is always this same wo that crops up: noth- 
ing I can ever think can account for what has been 
decreed. That too is a secret : mine comes to meet 
it. When it arrives shall I know? 


250 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


And not a word, not a word of this can reach 
you ever ! Its uses are wrung out and drained dry 
to comfort me in my eternal solitude. 

Good night; very soon it will have to be good- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


251 


LETTER LXXXI. 


Beloved, — I woke last night and believed I had 
your arms round me, and that all storms had gone 
over me forever. The peace of your love had en- 
closed me so tremendously that when I was fully 
awake I began to think that what I held was you 
dead, and that our reconciliation had come at that 
great cost. 

Something remains real of it all, even now under 
the full light of day: yet I know you are not dead. 
Only it leaves me with a hope that at the lesser 
cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness 
may break in, and that whichever of us has been 
the most in poor and needy ignorance will know 
the truth at last — the truth which is an insepar- 
able need for all hearts that love rightly. 

Even now to me the thought of you is a peace 
passing all understanding. Beloved, Beloved, Be- 
loved, all the greetings I ever gave you gather 
here, and are hungry to belong to you by a better 
way than I have ever dreamed. I am yours till 
something more than death swallows me up. 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LXXXII. 

Dearest, — If you will believe any word of mine, 
you must not believe that I have died of a broken 
heart should science and the doctors bring about 
a fulfilment of their present prophesyings con- 
cerning me. 

I think my heart has held me up for a long 
time, not letting me know that I was ill: I did 
not notice. And now my body snaps on a stem 
that has grown too thin to hold up its weight. I 
am at the end of twenty-two years : they have been 
too many for me, and the last has seemed a useless 
waste of time. It is difficult not to believe that 
great happiness might have carried me over many 
more years and built up for me in the end a re- 
newed }muth: I asked that quite frankly, wishing 
to know, and was told not to think it. 

So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever I may 
have written to fill up my worst loneliness, be sure, 
if you care to be, that though my life was wholly 
yours, my death was my own, and comes at its 
right natural time. Pity, me, but invent no blame 
to yourself. My heart has sung of you even in the 
darkest days ; in the face of everything, the blank- 
ness of everything, I mean, it has clung to an un- 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


253 


reasoning belief that in spite of appearances all 
had some well in it, above all to a conviction that 
— perhaps without knowing it — you still love me. 
Believing that , it could not break, could not, dear- 
est. Any other part of me, but not that. 

Beloved, I kiss your face, I kiss your lips and 
eyes : my mind melts into kisses when I think of 
you. However weak the rest of me grows, my love 
shall remain strong and certain. If I could look 
at you again, how in a moment you would fill up 
the past and the future and turn even my grief 
into gold! Even my senses then would forget 
that they had ever been starved. Dear “ share of 
the world/’ you have been out of sight, but I have 
never let you go ! Ah, if only the whole of me, the 
double doubting part of me as well, could only be 
so certain as to be able to give wings to this and 
let it fly to you ! Wish for it, and I think the 
knowledge will come to me ! 

Good night ! God brings you to me in my first 
dream: but the longing so keeps me awake that 
sometimes I am a whole night sleepless. 


254 


AX ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LXXXIII. 


I am frightened, dearest, I am frightened at death. 
Xot only for fear it should take me altogether 
away from you instead of to you, but for other 
reasons besides, — instincts which I thought gone 
but am not rid of even yet. Xo healthy body, or 
body with power of enjoyment in it, wishes to 
die, I think: and no heart with any desire still 
living out of the past. We know nothing at all 
really: we only think we believe, and hope we 
know ; and how thin that sort of conviction gets 
when in our extremity we come face to face witli 
the one immovable fact of our own death waiting 
for us ! That is what I have to go through. Yet 
even the fear is a relief: I come upon something 
that I can meet at last ; a challenge to mv cour- 
age whether it is still to be found here in this 
body I have worn so weak with useless lamenta- 
tions. If I had your hand, or even a word from 
you, I think 1 should not be afraid: but perhaps 
T should. It is all one. Good-by: I am beginning 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


255 


at last to feel a meaning in that word which I 
wrote at your bidding so long ago. Oh, Beloved, 
from face to feet, good-by. God be with you 
wherever you go and I do not! 


25G 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S 


LETTER LXXXIV. 


Dearest, — I am to have news of you. Arthur 
came to me last night, and told me that, if I 
wished, he would bring me word of you. He goes 
to-morrow. He put out the light that I might not 
see his face : I felt what was there. 

You should know this of him : he has been the 
dearest possible of human beings to me since I 
lost you. I am almost not unblessed when I have 
him to speak to. Yet we can say so little together. 
I guess all he means. An endless wish to give 
me comfort: — and I stay selfish. The knowledge 
that he would stolidly die to serve me hardly 
touches me. 

Oh, look kindly in his eyes if you see him: 
mine will be looking at you out of his ! 


LOVE-LETTERS. 


257 


LETTER LXXXY. 

Good morning. Beloved; there is sun shining. I 
wonder if Arthur is with you yet ? 

If faith could still remove mountains, surely I 
should have seen you long ago. But if I were to 
see you now, I should fear that it meant you were 
dead. 

That the same world should hold you and me 
living and unseen by each other is a great mystery. 
Will love ever explain it? 

I wish I could bid the sun stand still over your 
meeting with Arthur so that I might know. We 
were so like each other once. Time has worn it 
off: but he is like what I was. Will you remem- 
ber me well enough to recognize me in him, and 
to be a little pitiful to my weak longing for a 
word this one last time of all? Beloved, I press 
my lips to yours, and pray — speak! 

17 


258 


AN ENGLISHWOMAN’S 


LETTER LNXXYI. 

Dearest, — To-day Arthur came and brought me 
your message : I have at my heart your “ pro- 
foundly grateful remembrances.” Somewhere else 
mi answered lies your prayer for God to bless me. 
To answer that, dearest, is not in His hands but 
in y ours. And , r the form of your message tells me 
it will not be, — not for this body and spirit that 
have been bound together so long in truth to you. 

I set down for you here — if you should ever, for 
love’s sake, rend and make claim for any message 
back from me — a profoundly grateful remem- 
brance ; and so much more, so much more that has 
never failed. 

Most dear, most beloved, you were to me and 
are. Now 1 can no longer hold together: but it 
is my body, not my love that has failed. 











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